


Rhapsody in Pink

by the1918



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: (And Popped), Anal Fingering, Anal Sex, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Ass Play, Avengers Compound, Barebacking, Blow Jobs, Blushing, Bottom Steve Rogers, Breeding Kink (Blink and You’ll Miss it), Bucky Barnes Has Issues, Bucky Barnes Recovering, Bucky Barnes Remembers, Canon Divergence - Post-Avengers: Age of Ultron (Movie), Dirty Talk, Emotional Sex, Explicit Sexual Content, Fanart, First Times, Hallucinations, Horny Bucky Barnes, Light Dom/sub, M/M, Made-Up Neurological Diagnoses, Magical Healing Ass, Masturbation, Mental Instability, Mildly Dubious Consent (See Chapter 6 Notes), Mindfuck, Nipple Play, Possessive Bucky, Possessive Sex, Resolved Sexual Tension, Rough Sex, Sex Obsession, Sexual Fantasy, Smut, Some Cherries Were Injured in the Making of this Fic, Sub Steve Rogers, Top Bucky Barnes, because Hydra fucked with his head okay
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-05
Updated: 2020-10-10
Packaged: 2021-03-07 23:15:07
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 28,309
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26735728
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the1918/pseuds/the1918
Summary: After being chemically castrated for the entirety of his time as Hydra’s Winter Soldier, Bucky is attempting to recover his life—with the help of his oldest and best friend—when seventy years of a denied libido suddenly comes raging back in a series of graphic hallucinations. Steve is there to help.(Or: Bucky Barnes’s dick wakes up after a seven-decade nap. It is very interested in Steve Rogers.)* * *Post-CA:TWS / AOU canon divergence, set at the Avengers up-state facility.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers
Comments: 610
Kudos: 1390
Collections: Bottom Steve Rogers Fest 2020





	1. Freight Car

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Rhapsody in Pink [Art]](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26756380) by [hundredthousands](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hundredthousands/pseuds/hundredthousands). 



> Enormous thanks to [the_gods_wife](https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_gods_wife/pseuds/the_gods_wife) for beta, and to [HaniTrash](https://archiveofourown.org/users/HaniTrash/pseuds/HaniTrash) and [ixalit](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ixalit/pseuds/ixalit) for additional support.
> 
> I hope you enjoy reading this six-part story, as it has been the greatest pleasure of my steve/bucky writing career to write, and an absolute privilege to have had [hundredthousands](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hundredthousands/pseuds/hundredthousands) paint the words in my head.

* * * * * * *

**Rhapsody in Pink**

Story by [the1918](https://archiveofourown.org/users/the1918/pseuds/the1918) || Art by [hundredthousands](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hundredthousands/pseuds/hundredthousands)

* * * * * * *

The first time it happens is two days after he gets the new arm.

Bucky likes this arm; it’s lighter, and it’s his. It is a functional matte black instead of gleaming silver. It’s still made from vibranium like the old Hydra arm, but the medical team at this facility and the young Stark— _Tony_ , Steve’s friend—said that the new arm is ‘an improved alloy.’ After the first arm is taken away and examined by people Bucky doesn’t know and doesn’t need to, he learns with absolutely no sense of shock that Hydra’s weapon had been loaded down with at least a dozen invisible and nefarious devices previously unknown to him. A GPS tracker, which he had at least assumed was present. An electrical device that, when activated, would make the Asset’s heart stop. A pump connecting the Asset’s bloodstream to a host of chemicals and pharmaceuticals serving purposes that would take the medical team some time to catalogue.

(It’s that last one that makes Steve shake in the chair next to Bucky, a big body to contain an even bigger rage wherever Bucky and Hydra are concerned.)

But the new arm… the new arm is good. It _feels_ good. It takes a few days for Bucky to adjust to the new neural hookups, to figure out how to move and balance less weight, to relearn what it is to know sensation in two hands at once—touch, cold. Heat. Sometimes he lays quiet in his bed, moving his black vibranium fingertips around, touching his own skin. It’s all new, but it isn’t long before this arm starts to feel like a part of his body in the way Hydra’s arm never could.

This arm is one more item on the slowly growing list of things that make Bucky feel like he belongs to himself. It can be hard, some days, especially the moments when a new thread of an old memory touches just inside the back of his mind with a featherlight tickle and hovers, only for seconds, before disappearing as a fading flame in a forgotten lantern. Those are the moments that leave a tired, cold gap between who Bucky thinks he is and who Steve says he was.

Steve says that Bucky had a family, had sisters. Bucky does not remember their names. Steve says that Bucky had friends in his fellow soldiers—“our Howlies”—but Bucky can’t recall them. Steve says that Bucky’s been his friend since he was six years old, that Bucky peeled him off playgrounds and grimy alley floors, that he protected Steve through famine and through war. Bucky knows in his bones that _those_ things are true, even if memory fails him.

There are some things he does remember. He remembers falling. Some memories smell like gunpowder, while others look like old wallpaper. Bucky’s spine has ached at the recollection of uncomfortable furniture in a shabby Brooklyn tenement, but even there he doesn’t find Steve’s face, though he knows Steve should be there. Steve says he was smaller, then. Bucky looks for a small boy with Steve’s face. He still comes up empty.

Steve never dwells. Steve smiles. He tells Bucky that it’s okay if he never remembers, that he is still Steve’s best friend.

Bucky dwells.

He has at least come to feel enough like someone whose name could be _James Buchanan Barnes_ to be comfortable being ‘Bucky.’ He finds he likes having his own name, and a nickname, even. Steve sometimes calls him ‘Buck,’ but no one else does that—only Steve. Bucky likes that part, too.

The rest of Steve’s team call him other things. Romanov, Barton, and Sam call him ‘Barnes,’ and Bucky is fine with that; it’s simple. The Vision calls him ‘Sergeant Barnes,’ which always prods at half-seen places in the dark of his mind, but sometimes that is a good thing. Wanda calls him ‘Bucky,’ and Stark—the only one besides Barton that doesn’t live in this grandiose compound, despite being the one to have built it—is never around to call Bucky much of anything.

It is two days after Bucky gets his new arm, and the only one around at all right now is Sam. Steve and the others had left the day before for a mission—a “milk run,” Steve had called it. Bucky knows that Sam was asked to stay behind because of Bucky, because no one feels quite comfortable leaving him alone yet, and Bucky thinks they’re smart for that. Bucky likes Sam. Sam is fiercely loyal, to Steve in particular, and Sam swears that any friend of Steve is a friend of his.

(Bucky had once asked Sam if that still applies to friends of Steve who have also tried to kill Steve. Sam had smiled back—“ _Especially_ those friends.”)

It is ten in the morning, and Bucky enters the team’s shared kitchen to find Sam sitting on a stool with a little bowl of something on the countertop in front of him. Bucky peers closer. Sam is eating cherries.

“Mmn,” Sam grunts in greeting.

Bucky watches Sam spit out a pit into a separate dish, and it makes a clinking sound as the solid object pings against ceramic. Sam raises his brows and holds the bowl out to Bucky.

“Cherry?”

Bucky stares at the offered food. He takes it, and he realizes that he does not know what a cherry tastes like. Hydra had never been big on fresh fruit, and his memories of James Buchanan Barnes’s personal gastronomic preferences have not returned to him. He’s not sure they will. But cherries look worth a taste, so Bucky picks one up.

This particular cherry between his forefinger and thumb is a deep, dark red, and it’s shiny. It looks appetizing and plump while the skin of it seems thin, like it won’t take much at all to puncture it with his teeth. Bucky wonders if cherry juice can cause a mess, if it stains clothing, and he raises it up for a taste when suddenly the cherry is not a cherry at all.

It’s a mouth.

The cherry is a set of lips; full, thick. Close. There is no face except for maybe the ghost of a nose, the room around him having gone dark and gray save for the burst of color before him, and then _a tongue peeks out from between a row of white, perfectly straight teeth to slick that pretty bottom lip and then_ the lights are on again and that _wet, red mouth_ is just a shiny piece of fruit and Sam’s voice is speaking.

“Barnes—you okay?”

He looks up and finds Sam staring at him. Bucky sees something like concern in the furrow of Sam’s brow.

“Yeah, yeah. I’m, uh—”

“Kinda looked like you spaced out there for a minute. Like you… Like you went someplace else.”

Bucky is still holding the cherry. He is probably bruising it with how hard he’s pinching it, and he can hear his own heart racing. He blinks twice, and then once more for good measure, staring—but the cherry is only a cherry.

“Shit, yeah, sorry,” he says, shaking his head. “Didn’t sleep too much last night. Think I’m gonna go see if I can make a nap happen.”

Sam is still looking at him a little bit warily, but he nods, looking down to his phone. “Good idea. See you ‘round.”

Bucky nods and turns to leave. Sam’s bowl stays, but Bucky’s cherry comes with him.

He goes back to the apartment that he and Steve share and he shuts himself in his bedroom with efficiency. Planting himself on the edge of the mattress, Bucky studies the uneaten fruit nestled between his thumb and his forefinger and sees that the flesh of it has gone soft, tenderized by how tight he has been clinging to it. He stares and he stares, trying to summon the strange image from before, but it does not appear.

It doesn’t matter, Bucky realizes; his mind can still recall it. It’s different from finding a lost memory, too dreamlike and too weightless, but Bucky is learning that something does not have to be a memory for him to be able to remember it. To remember _lips_.

Two lips: one on top, one below. Lips are meant for eating, for speaking. For rounding out vowels and biting on consonants and communicating. He knows that people also… kiss, using lips, and people do that all the time, but that’s—not. Kissing with lips is not something Bucky does. _Kissing_ is not something Bucky does at all, in fact, and he has no reason to. Bucky does not have a lover, and he is not a lover himself. Kissing is not something he remembers James Buchanan Barnes doing either, but he knows that does not mean it didn’t happen.

Bucky assesses his current situation. He is alone in his room, alone in the apartment. Bucky knows that he is allowed to do almost anything he wants if only because he wants it, because Steve always tells him that wanting something is reason enough to ask for it.

Bucky—inexplicably—wants very much to kiss.

As he presses his mouth to the plump flesh of the fruit and lets his eyes slide shut, he recalls the vision that was shown to him of that sweet, delicate mouth. His tongue peeks out without his permission, and he takes a _lick_ , imagining he’s swiping wet against the amenable seam between those two lips. It’s intoxicating. He wants more. Bucky finally lets his teeth sink into that bottom lip and it feels so damn _pink_ , he realizes, and then there is a sudden and intrusive thought that this mouth feels puffy and wet like it’s been sucking hard on… something, and then he cannot stop himself from biting down harder until he reaches the resistance at the middle.

Tart sugar floods his mouth.

Now Bucky knows how cherries taste.

* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story is a bit of a long one, guys. Do not be fooled by the word count in the first two chapters.


	2. Daybreak

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am positively overwhelmed by the feedback I received on Ch. 1. Thank you! Excited to share more...

* * *

The second time it happens, Bucky is alone.

It’s been three days since he first tasted cherries, and it’s been _two_ days since he started _dreaming_ about cherries: the way they look, the way they taste, the way they break between his teeth. The way they go soft under his fingertips when he presses on the flesh. When he’d snapped awake the previous night to the feeling of a hot flush burning his skin and too much drool wetting his lips, he had quietly asked F.R.I.D.A.Y. to include a fresh bag with the next delivery of groceries.

(The A.I. had asked him which variety of cherries he would like, and Bucky had not known there were different types to pick from. He’d asked her to choose for him.)

_(“Whichever kind is most red. Please.”)_

Steve is away, still. His milk run of a mission is lasting longer than he’d said it would. Sam says he has received a handful of communications from the team and that everyone is uninjured, just delayed. Bucky wonders if Sam would tell him otherwise if things with the mission were not well, but Bucky decides that’s not important. He believes Sam when he says Steve is coming home soon.

Sam is a good person to pass time with. Steve always says that Sam would be a _“good resource”_ for Bucky to talk to about some of the things he remembers from the last seventy years _—“if you ever felt like talking, Buck”_ —but Bucky doesn’t feel like talking. He likes that Sam doesn’t ask.

He particularly likes to sit and watch television with Sam. He does that a lot when Steve is away on missions, and he always tells Sam to pick what they should watch. Bucky notices that Sam likes to flip through channels, but that he never stops on the reality shows that Romanov frequents. Sam seems to have a particular predilection for comedies when selecting films (Bucky likes to laugh with Sam, even if he doesn’t always get the jokes), but he tends to stay away from action movies and things with a lot of guns or explosions. Bucky is silently glad of that.

(Actors kiss a lot in films these days, Bucky notices. He finds himself analyzing the shape of women’s lips. Men’s lips, too. They’re all wrong; none of them look like the incorporeal lips in Bucky’s dreams.)

Bucky still prefers solitude most of the time. He likes wandering the grounds of the Avengers facility, something he’s been doing ever since he first arrived to stay with Steve. In the beginning, Bucky would just walk in contemplative loops around the building itself, sticking close by—much more for Steve’s comfort than for his own—but lately he’s begun to branch out. The compound is nestled in a remote area of otherwise undeveloped land and is dotted with patches of woodland. There is one grove in particular that Bucky likes to visit because a narrow, rocky stream runs through, and there is always an abundance of flow in it following rain. He likes the way that the quiet sounds of water—babbling, falling across stone—helps to drown out noise from the wrong kind of memories.

He has decided that he will walk through his favorite grove this evening. The sun is low, but Bucky knows he’ll have light for at least another hour. He stops and settles down on the dirt bank next to the brook, not caring if his joggers get a little bit muddy. Bucky is working to shut his mind off and breathe in the late spring air when he finds himself surrendering to a sudden urge to dig his metal fingers into the wet gravel of the stream.

Bucky likes that his new arm picks up on sensations and feelings that the old arm never did, that Hydra didn’t need it to. Before, his prosthetic could sense only pressure, but _this_ arm feels more, so he lets it. He lets the subtle sense memories of a natural environment quietly return to him as he sits on the bank and plays with slick river pebbles, appreciating the way that both the rocks and his metal hand are cooled by the running water and the shade of the tree canopy. The surface of each tiny stone has been softened by erosion, edges rounded by Earth’s clock. He wonders when the last time was that James Buchanan Barnes got to sit and enjoy nature. He thinks Steve might be able to tell him.

Bucky tumbles the rocks between his fingers and exhales. His mind slowly relaxes into a state of quiet as he admires the smooth, wet surface with his fingertips, noting the pleasant mix of colors. It's an attractive blend; there are blues and grays that are as cool in tone as the temperature of the stream itself, but his favorites are definitely these two little pink pebbles he’s touching now. They are pretty and hard while still being softer than the rest—well, wherever the rest of the pebbles _went_ ; Bucky can’t see any of them now. He can’t see rocks or streams or water or trees at all, in fact, but if he’s being honest he doesn’t really care to devote his attention to anything other than these two rosy bits of sweet beneath his hand and oh, look, his flesh hand has come to touch, too. He’s glad. Having both hands means that he can rub each of the two pretty pebbles—are they pebbles?—at the same time, and neither will feel sad or left out.

Soon his field of vision begins to broaden outward from the two lovely objects of his attention, the gray background of woodland at dusk having long since faded and now giving way to sweet expanses of apricot and flesh. There is _pink_ , the flagship color of that brand new notion (desire, creeping back into his mind), but this time it is not a bitten mouth.

It’s a chest, Bucky realizes. It is gorgeous, male, and it is _warm and hard and full of strong muscle. He is suddenly overcome with an urge to ravish it, and why should he not? Reverently, Bucky cups one of those two shapely pectorals—one of this man’s lovely_ tits _, his brain supplies—and he squeezes it just the way he wants to. He expects the body to make a sound for some reason, but it doesn’t (or if it does, Bucky cannot hear it, all of the world’s noises still static and white)—but Bucky_ feels _it. His fingertips are all he needs to hear the delicate vibration from the strong lungs inside skin and flesh and heat, and it vaults Bucky into a force of yearning he did not know he was capable of before._

_He needs to feel that noise again._

_Using both metal and flesh in equal measure, Bucky begins to… pinch. He starts lightly at first, just a small squeeze to admire the way each nipple begins to fill with the flush of blood beneath skin. He soon increases the pressure, incrementally, and he is rewarded each time. He rubs and he pulls and plucks and soothes, and as Bucky works, the delicate mounds on these pretty tits turn from a light rose to a deep fuchsia. He finds hues and shades in the warmth of this body that Bucky did not even know had names until right this moment. He wants to taste these new colors, Bucky realizes; he wants to run to his tongue over them. His mouth is beginning to water. His palette has known sweet vermillion cherries. Now, Bucky needs to taste_ pink _._

 _He licks his lips_ —and the colors go dark.

The entire grove goes dark, in fact. Bucky can’t see much but the neural sensors in his new arm tell him that he’s holding a handful of rocks, of wet stone and grit. What he can see tells him that night has fallen.

Bucky is back, and someone has turned on the stars.

—

Steve returns from his mission late that night. Bucky is lying awake in bed when he hears the front door to their unit open, hears the shuffle of heavy, tired feet travel across the living room of their apartment towards the bedroom adjoining Bucky’s.

Bucky doesn’t sleep. Hours later, in the dead of the night, his enhanced ears pick up on the distinct sounds of Steve caught in a distressing dream. Bucky has had dreams cut from the very same cloth, and he’s heard these noises from Steve before: moans of pain, punctuated sighs of half-choked fear. In spite of the tugging feeling inside of Bucky’s rib cage, he does not go to Steve. He’s not sure what help he could ever be.

Steve awakens with a cry. Bucky hears him get up after a moment, padding towards the bathroom.

He doesn’t see Steve until morning.

* * *


	3. Longing

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The first two chapters were really just a ramp-up. The real action starts here.

* * *

Seven days come and go, quietly. One week.

It is good to have Steve back. Steve has had to disappear on missions often in the time since Bucky has come to live with him and his team at the compound, but none of those missions have lasted quite as long as Steve’s milk run. Bucky feels a sense of balance when Steve is around that is absent when Steve is away. He thinks that perhaps it’s the nature of having an untethered mind, free-tumbling through the present because a few dozen broken fragments of memory are not enough to anchor one’s consciousness to the past. Bucky does not know where he’s been—not really, not enough—so he can’t see where he’s going. He can barely see where he is.

He may not have an anchor, Bucky thinks. But when he has Steve, at least he has rope.

Perhaps it’s because he does feel more level, but those next seven days come and go and they pass without any new… intrusive thoughts. Bucky doesn’t gray-out when he’s helping with the dishes, isn’t forcibly ripped from his conscious presence—standing next to Steve in their kitchen, hands soapy in the sink—to go and defile the body parts of imaginary humans that do not exist. He doesn’t dissociate while eating his morning oatmeal, doesn’t check clear out of his mind to wander through intense, graphic imaginings that he is pinching the warm flesh of no one at all.

Bucky doesn’t have _new_ thoughts, but he cannot stop himself from revisiting those he has already had. He certainly can’t stop the dreams.

He thinks maybe he should feel guilty about it. He thinks it must be wrong to shut his eyes in the shower and to lean his forehead against the wet tile, to let the images stuck behind his eyelids rage free and swim in his brain, to slip his own fingertips into his mouth and swirl his tongue around them, imagining they are the rosy peaks on the muscled chest of some false man. He thinks it should be wrong to dream of wet lips sweeping over his skin, sizzling and burning, leaving wet charcoal in their trail.

Bucky thinks it must all be wrong, that he should hate himself for it. Sometimes, Bucky will remember what Steve always says, how Bucky shouldn’t feel guilt for the things he could not or cannot control when his mind takes him to places that he does not consent to go. Bucky will think of that and then he will feel alright for a time, but it does not last. There is a voice in the back of his brain that reminds him of the way he’s been waking up in a hot sweat each night to find his sane, waking mind willingly clinging to the last vestiges of dreams filled with lips and teeth and tongue.

(He resolutely ignores the way his penis has begun to… warm, to swell a little bit more each time. A mind run free is one thing. It might just break him if his body joins the mutiny.)

Bucky walks around with that conflict heavy in his chest, but it’s easier to distract himself now that Steve is home. Steve has no idea what’s in Bucky’s head, of course. Bucky knows he could tell Steve and Steve would not judge, as with every other bit of wrong that Bucky has ever shared with him. Bucky can tell Steve of the Soldier’s targets, of his violence, and he knows exactly how Steve will react. He knows how Steve will listen and nod, how he will squeeze Bucky’s shoulder with a warm hand when the talking inevitably brings something else to the surface. Telling Steve about the people he’s killed is a known quantity, and Bucky knows how to do it by this point. The way of it is easy, even if the doing is hard.

But murder and lust feel… different, for some reason. He thinks of killing, and it feels natural. He thinks of desire, and he feels like James Buchanan Barnes.

It’s frightening. Bucky says nothing to Steve.

The best distractions turn out to be the kind that allow Bucky to move his body around. He finds it’s harder to stare into the distance and think of bare skin if he’s doing something with his hands, moving his muscles, focusing on completing a task. He elects to discontinue his walks around the compound for the time being and spend more time in the team’s gym instead. The exertion helps. F.R.I.D.A.Y. doubles Steve’s regular shipment of new punching bags.

Today, Steve has asked Bucky to spar with him. They’ve done this before—plenty of times—and it’s such a good way of keeping busy that Bucky has begun to expand out to other partners. He likes the way that Romanov’s speed and skill challenge him. He likes the danger of Sam, in and out of his suit. Still, none of that is quite so rewarding as sparring with someone who can match Bucky pound for pound, meet strength with strength. The feeling Bucky gets when he catches Steve’s punch in his fist is almost as good as seeing Steve’s face each time Bucky blocks him.

The two of them have been throwing hits at each other forever, it feels, ratcheting up the difficulty level on each other gradually, and both he and Steve have broken a satisfying sweat. They stop to break for water. It’s only when he’s watching Steve run a towel through his sandy blond hair and a bead of sweat comes tumbling down Steve’s face that Bucky realizes he has not dreamt of imaginary flesh in several hours.

Steve drains his bottle and tosses the towel aside.

“Ready?” Steve asks.

Bucky takes one more swig and nods, grinning.

“Alright, Rogers. You’re lookin’ tired. Guess I’ll go easy on you this time.”

Steve drops his head towards the mat and laughs, soft and light, the way he does when he’s only around Bucky because that laugh is everything Captain America isn’t.

“That’s sweet’a you, Buck.” Steve squares up. “Let’s go.”

Steve—as he always does—swings first. Bucky is ready for it, catching the wrist in his metal hand and going for Steve’s trunk with the fist of the other. Steve blocks it. Bucky deflects and manages to deliver a solid shoulder hit, earning a satisfying grunt from Steve. He doesn’t step back fast enough to avoid Steve’s ambitious kick to the chest. Steve puts just the right amount of pressure behind it to land Bucky on his ass without really hurting him, but Bucky recovers quickly. He sweeps a leg around under Steve’s feet and knocks him on his back with an _‘ungh’_ sound, joining Bucky on the mat. Steve never protects his legs enough.

This is probably their tenth round of the day, but for some reason, Bucky finds himself paying more attention to the noises Steve makes each time Bucky lands a hit. He groans through gritted teeth when Bucky successfully grabs him in a chokehold on the floor, before flipping Bucky over and off of him. Soon they’re both back on their feet, trading swings, and when Bucky delivers the first punch in a one-two maneuver, Steve’s throat releases something that is somewhere between a grunt and a moan.

Maybe Bucky is dehydrated, maybe he should have drunk more water. Whatever the reason, Bucky misjudges his aim for the very first time in his life. His right fist catches Steve’s lip on the upswing with full force.

Steve stumbles back, and Bucky can see him reeling from the accidental hit. His own breath catches.

“Shit—fuck, Steve, I’m sorry.”

Steve blinks several times and shakes his head, trying to clear the slight shock. His face curls into a surprised, crooked smile. Bucky watches Steve raise his fingertips up to his mouth to touch it, and it’s the moment that Steve brings his hand away to look at the little spot of red that Bucky realizes Steve has a split lip, that he’s bleeding from the corner of his mouth, that Steve’s mouth is actually two lips—one on top, one below—with an entire face and body instead of just the ghost of a nose and Bucky—

_Longing._

The word had a very distinct meaning to him, once. To the Soldier. But today—for Bucky Barnes—longing is a different kind of blade.

The picture before him of Steve’s stained lips pierces through Bucky and skewers him over longing’s sword, the puncture wound clean, carving perfect holes through the meat of his insides. His breath is ripped viciously through the floor of his lungs until his gut is awash with the oxygen, chemical fuel, combusting into white flames and heating a coil at the base of his spine that he had not known was lying cold inside of him.

He is completely hard inside his pants, for the first time in seventy years.

Steve’s tongue darts out to lick at the blood. Perhaps lips are meant for eating and for speaking, and yes, perhaps kissing is not something Bucky does, but _Steve’s_ lips are a burst of color with _a tongue that peeks out from between a row of white, perfectly straight teeth to slick that pretty_ —bloody— _bottom lip and then_ and then and _then_ Steve is chuckling and grabbing the bottom edge of his shirt to lift it and wipe away the mess that Bucky left on his sweet, pink mouth but it’s _more_ than just that, it’s more than a punch-bitten mouth, it’s—

 _No._ No, not. Not this. He chokes, his airways stuffed with cotton.

Bucky has seen Steve’s chest a hundred times before. Bucky has never _seen_ Steve’s chest. He sees now that it is gorgeous and male and that Steve’s tits look like they would be warm and hard and pink under his hands and Bucky is overcome with a biological imperative to devour every inch of them.

  
Cherry juice is gasoline, and Bucky has been drenched in it.

Steve—it turns out—is a matchstick.

Bucky bursts into flames where he stands. He must; he is sure that he must. Bucky must be a pile of hot ashes right there on the mat, because the gym is not on fire but he smells burning in the air. He hears the sounds of _pink_ and pebbles and stones falling to the earth, echoing like a faraway drum in his ears. The taste of tart sugar floods his mouth again.

He needs to go. The gym walls are closing in. Bucky cannot stay here.

“Buck, are you—hey, I’m fine, pal, it’s just a little split, where are you go—"

Bucky’s hands are shaking as he reaches for his towel and water bottle, trying to keep an even façade. He knows that he is failing.

“Sorry, I’m. I’m tired. Didn’t get a lotta sleep, goin’ sloppy on you. Sorry.”

Bucky turns on his heel to exit the gym as fast as possible. He allows one last weak glance at Steve on his way out and sees him finally drop the bloodied edge of his shirt. Steve licks absently at his lips, confused. The last smear of red goes back to pink.

The hallways of the compound fly by him. Bucky stops to talk to no one, makes eye contact with no one, and he discreetly holds a sweaty towel in front of the shame in his groin.

He closes the apartment door and prays that Steve will not follow behind too quickly. His feet carve out a direct path to his bedroom, but he finds himself doubling back to the kitchen, going for the bowl of fruit Steve likes to keep on the countertop.

Bucky grabs his bag of cherries.

The door to his room shuts loudly behind him, but no one else is around to hear it. Bucky locks it. He hastily reaches his metal hand into the bag and comes out with a palmful of ripe, red fruit, surprising himself with the low groan he lets out at the sight. He sets the bag aside on the nightstand.

Bucky knows—surprisingly—exactly what he’s about to do. He knows how masturbation works, even if he has no memory of doing it. He settles himself on the center of the bed with his sweatpants shoved down around his ankles and he slams his eyes shut, wrapping his flesh hand around his now painfully hard penis—around his dick, his _cock_. The sensation makes him hiss. He’s immediately tugging on himself and rubbing the clear, leaking fluid all over the shaft, feeling nothing short of desperation to relieve the unforgiving burn of arousal licking into and out of his insides.

His mind takes him exactly where it needs to go, where it’s wanted to go for days. He begins to card back through every little detail about the pink mouth and hard chest that have been living in his head, and it is nothing short of stunning, how much it goes beyond anything it’s been before.

This time, the pink mouth and hard chest have his best friend’s face.

The details don’t change, because it’s not the first time Bucky has imagined these parts of Steve, not at all. They are _all_ he’s imagined, the shapes and colors of images he’s seen without seeing. He’s been on fire thinking of Steve _—_ Bucky’s imaginary man—and Bucky did not know it.

And now, it’s like chains have been broken. Bucky is at last free to imagine this picture as it should be. He can see every part of it in crystal clear detail, every fractal of sensation, every color, each one bleeding into the next. He can envision exactly the way Steve would squeeze his eyes shut and bite his lip to keep in his little sounds. He can _hear_ the little moans and whines and whimpers, now that he knows the voice that owns them. He can imagine every nuance of how Steve’s face and voice and body would respond when Bucky bites at his lips and licks at his chest, pinching sweet nipples, teasing, playing.

It doesn’t take long. He’s on the precipice of a level of pleasure he cannot comprehend when he remembers the handful of cherries still clenched in his metal fist. He opens his eyes to find them now crushed, bleeding juice onto his palm and bedspread. All the cherry pits have either slipped through the cracks in his fingers or have been pulverized by vibranium.

He takes in the stark image, the brilliant red staining. The richly-colored fruit pulp standing out against the thin silver joinings between the vibranium plates has some of the brightest crimsons and pinks that Bucky has ever seen with waking eyes, and it’s that sight in particular that brings the traitorous sound of his own voice suddenly roaring back in his head. It reminds him that these beautiful colors smashed inside his fist have got nothing on the vivid hues of Steve Rogers’s lips.

But—the voice reasons—they might look _almost_ as good wrapped around his cock.

He’s switching hands before he can stop himself. The freed flesh limb flies up to grip his own hair while stained metal fingers wrap around his erection, smearing flush-red juice all over the length.

The sight is far more than Bucky can handle. It empties his lungs. He shoots over his own hand.

Later, when Bucky is still trying to catch his breath and wondering why his dick has not yet wilted, a tendril of relaxation pierces through the guilt and the panic to appreciate the look of the fluids coating his wrist, two kinds now mixing together. White, and red. The soft rose pink that’s borne of it is so much like the blush that always colors Steve’s cheeks.

* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The incredible feedback from the first two chapters was so intense that I couldn’t help but hit “post” on this chapter a full seven hours earlier than I had planned. You all are amazing (keep the love coming—you give me LIFE!).


	4. Rusted

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The truth comes out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all so much for the comments. I have never been more excited to check my inbox!

* * *

The next two times it happens, Bucky is very much not alone.

It’s been three whole days now since his punch split Steve’s lip and Bucky came into a fist full of fruit. He’s been jerking off in his room, avoiding Steve like a plague and trying to ignore the hurt expression on Steve’s face, for three whole days.

This morning, Bucky is taking a break from himself. Bucky is watching television.

Sam is there, like usual, but there is also Wanda. Bucky likes Wanda. She is kind to him and to others and she is quiet, with a smile that inspires feelings of trust even from Bucky. He’d thought it strange and confusing at first, that he’d felt so comfortable around her, even from the beginning. When he’d confessed as much to Steve, Steve had told him with emotion in his voice about the one thing that Wanda has in common with Bucky that no one else here does.

He’s never spoken with Wanda about it—about being Hydra’s lab rat. He doesn’t want to. Bucky looks at Wanda and sees that she has love and family and even her own favorite foods and it makes Bucky feel… good. Wanda Maximoff, with her kind smile and her passion for peanut butter and her secret lover with a floaty cape, is maybe proof of a future that can also exist for Bucky.

“Barnes, I swear to God, if you make me watch another episode of _Chopped_ then I’m gonna shave your head in your sleep. Gimme that remote.”

Bucky finds himself smiling at Sam’s irritated joke. It feels good. He isn’t nearly as enthralled with this cooking program as Sam thinks he is, but it’s not so bad and Wanda seems to be enjoying it and it’s definitely amusing to watch Sam roll his eyes at the dramatic pauses for suspense before every advertising break.

“Alright,” Bucky sighs, pretending to be put-out at having to hand over the control. “Lemme find it.”

When he’d last seen the black television remote, it had been on the coffee table, but it’s not there now. Bucky gets up out of his armchair and looks around. He doesn’t find it on the floor.

“Maybe it fell in the seat?” Wanda suggests.

Bucky shrugs and begins to pull out the pillowy tan seat rest. It takes only a moment until he finds it, handing the controller over to Sam, and then he’s readjusting the soft leather seat cushions back into their place when suddenly the sounds of cooking shows become muted, as does the shape and light of the lounge.

He is staring down at where seat cushions once were and instead finding a _back_ —a man’s back. It is Steve’s back, Bucky knows by now. It is shirtless and muscled and there are _acres of creamy skin calling for Bucky’s touch, so he provides it, he gives it, how could he not? The arch of Steve’s spine is bowed into perfection because his head is hanging down between his arms, Greek god shoulder blades pressed up into the air while his mid-back presses down, and then Bucky’s eyes keep following those clean lines and he gets to—he gets to—_

_“Bucky,” a sweet voice breathes. “Touch me?”_

_Bucky’s hands are quick to go where his eyes go, moving, down and down. Steve’s flesh is smooth but hard until Bucky’s finds his bottom—finds Steve’s_ ass _—and then it is nothing but supple flesh to fill up his palms and Bucky squeezes, he_ smacks _, lightly, but enough to make Steve moan. Bucky is kneeling behind him, and it would be so easy to just press himself forward and slip his dick up and down between these pretty cheeks, or maybe under, maybe he could slide and fuck his cock down until the head is nudging Steve’s balls and Steve is begging for Bucky, for something, for anything,_ and the last thought Bucky has before someone turns the lights back on is that _Steve’s ass would look so pretty streaked in come._

But the lights do come on. _Chopped_ has returned from commercial break. There is a pins-and-needles feeling in the crown of his dick that tells Bucky he had gotten hard _fast_ , standing up, right here in front of Wanda and Sam. He is silently thankful for the way the cushion he’s holding obscures his own lap, but he can’t keep holding it awkwardly the way that he is now. His one saving grace is that the ice of panic flooding his veins appears to be freezing out his arousal; he can already feel his erection going down.

“Barnes,” Sam says, carefully. “Barnes. Where did you just go?”

Bucky can’t dodge this. He has to try. He paints his own face with what should look like an amused smile.

“What do you mean? I’m right here,” Bucky tries. “Spaced out for a minute there, but I’m—”

“You weren’t,” Sam says.

“Bucky?”

Steve. Steve’s voice. Bucky turns, and Steve has entered the room. He doesn’t know how long he’s been there or what he’s seen, what he’s heard, but he knows that Steve can read a situation and know when something isn’t right.

Steve does that now. He looks from Bucky to Sam to Wanda and back to Sam, before finally back to Bucky.

“What’s wrong. Tell me.”

He tells Steve only enough to get him to stop asking questions.

It’s not everything. It’s nothing past the surface, really. What Bucky says is that sometimes he feels like he… goes away. He goes away, and he can’t control it. It’s the truth. He tells Steve that he loses time, and it’s weird but also it’s not like this is happening _all_ the time, and then Sam chimes in and calls him out _—“This ain’t even the first time I’ve seen you do it, Barnes”—_ and that’s when Steve gives Bucky a look of disappointment that cuts far too deep to be fair.

“Bucky, you… you should have said something,” Steve says softly. The concern on his face is not enough to mask the hurt. “You should have told me.”

 _How could I?_ Bucky screams, only to himself. _My mind is in pieces, dreaming of_ you.

What little he does tell Steve now is apparently enough for Steve to make a decision.

“C’mon, Buck.” Steve nods gently towards the doorway, turning to walk out. “We need to go to medical.”

—

Bucky should have known he couldn’t avoid this. He should have known he was never going to be able to hide something like this from Steve, not forever. Steve never misses so much as a funny look crossing Bucky’s face without asking him what’s wrong. Bucky counts himself lucky that he’s made it this far and that Steve still doesn’t know the ugliest part of the story, doesn’t know that when Bucky checks out like he had in the lounge it’s because his mind is forcing him to see exactly what Steve would look like bent over for Bucky.

He decides to tell a more complete truth to Dr. Cho than he did to Steve. It’s pointless not to, Bucky figures. He’s here. He doesn’t think he’s going to be able to leave until the doctors figure out what the hell is wrong with his head, so he might as well help them. A well-meaning voice somewhere in his brain—a voice that sounds an awful lot like Steve—reminds him that the doctors in this place aren’t here to hurt him, aren’t like Hydra, They have only ever helped make things better for Bucky.

That doesn’t make sitting in a weird chair and telling Cho about his uncontrollable sex fantasies any easier.

It’s just the two of them now, in Cho’s office. Steve had brought Bucky here and asked to see her (there is more than one genius doctor on the Avengers’ payroll, Bucky is aware, but he thinks Steve knows that Bucky likes Cho best) and then he’d debriefed her in his Captain voice about everything that had just happened, about what’s _been_ happening. Dr. Cho had listened and looked thoughtful and then asked to speak to Bucky alone.

Bucky thinks Cho knew that Steve wasn’t given the full story. He tells a more complete truth to Dr. Cho than he did to Steve, because he might as well help her figure out what’s wrong with his head, but it is still not the _complete_ truth.

“It’s no one I know,” Bucky lies. “Just. Bodies. Imaginary people. People I’ve seen in movies. They don’t feel like memories.”

Cho nods and scribbles something down.

“Tell me again when this started?”

“About fifteen days ago,” he answers, when he knows for a fact it has been exactly fifteen days.

She flips a page on her clipboard, then looks at the wall calendar.

“So, right after you had your prosthetic replaced. It didn’t happen when you had the Hydra arm.”

Bucky thinks about that for a minute. It’s true. He nods.

Cho tells him she needs to take a picture of his brain. Bucky tenses, which Cho sees. She is quick to assure him that she doesn’t need to cut into him to see what she needs, that there is a machine that can do that for her without having to crack open his skull. She says there won’t be any pain.

Bucky asks if he can have Steve come back in. She says yes. His friend comes in and sits in the weird chair next to Bucky’s, first giving him an efficient once-over with his eyes, before looking to the doctor.

Cho rolls her stool over and stops in front of Bucky, speaking to him directly.

“I suspect that what you’ve been experiencing is a type of absence seizure,” she says. “That would explain why you feel like you lose time. It’s not very common, but some people who experience absence seizures do report that they _see_ things, or imagine things.” Bucky appreciates that she doesn’t say what those ‘things’ are, not with Steve in the room. He doesn’t ask her if the other people imagine their best friend’s lips wrapped around their dick. “It does give me some pause to hear that the second episode you experienced may have gone on for an hour, because I’ve never seen absence seizures last that long. But I suppose I’ve seen stranger things from enhanced individuals.”

Steve is shaking his leg up and down in the seat next to him.

“Is that a good thing or a bad thing?” Steve asks. “Can you make them go away?”

“We need to see what the electrical signals are doing in his brain when he’s having one of these episodes.” She turns to Bucky again. “I’m going to get you in the PET scanner, and then we’re going to attempt and trigger a seizure.”

Bucky can feel Steve’s heckles raising.

“How?” Steve asks, the alarm evident in his tone already. Bucky sees the way he’s tensing up. “You won’t—you can’t use electricity, you can’t do what _they_ —”

“It’s okay, Steve,” Cho says. “We’re not going to do that at all. Based on what Bucky has told me about the different kinds of things that precede these episodes, all we’re going to do is try various types of sensory triggers. We’ll go down a list. We’ll have one of my assistants helping him to touch different things, moving between different textures—”

“I want to do it.”

Bucky looks over. Steve seems to realize that his mouth got ahead of him, and he looks down at his hands, blushing. Bucky does not know how it’s possible that he’s just been told that he’s going to have to endure yet another round of doctors examining him and the only thing he can think about is the specific shade of pink on Steve’s cheeks.

Steve looks to Bucky. His expression is unsure.

“If—if that’s what you want, Buck. Whatever you want. Just thought it might be best if it were me, ‘stead of some stranger.”

Bucky doesn’t waste time pretending to think about the offer. He nods at Steve, then at Cho.

“Okay,” Helen agrees. “That can work. Steve, you’ll be in the room with him while he’s in the scanner, and we can tell you over the intercom what to do.”

Bucky learns that a PET scan means _positron emission tomography_ , which means he gets stuck with a needle full of radioactive liquid so doctors can take colorful pictures of his brain. They draw a few blood samples, first, before they do any of that. Bucky thinks the nurse looks annoyed by having to work around Steve standing so close to him while they do it.

It is now one hour later, and Bucky is lying on a narrow table. The room he’s in is small, containing only himself, Steve, and the ugly machine they’re about to roll him into. There is an adjoining room separated by a window, with Cho and a smattering of assistants behind it. Steve is sitting in a chair by the machine with a rolling table next to him containing a strange assortment of objects. Each object is numbered, one to ten.

Cho had listened when Bucky spoke. Item number ten is a bowl of cherries.

“Are we ready in there?”

Steve takes a big breath and looks at Bucky, raising an eyebrow in question. Bucky nods. Steve reaches down and gives him a friendly squeeze on his shoulder. Bucky is very happy about the blanket Dr. Cho had graciously placed over his lap because, _“this room can get cold, sometimes.”_

There’s a faint mechanical hum as the surface he’s lying on begins to shift. Bucky exhales and stares at the ceiling. Cho had said this procedure could take an hour in a hospital, but in her machine, they will only need a minute once Bucky’s seizure begins in order to get what they need.

He almost asks Steve if he can hold on to his hand.

Then he is being rolled backwards, the cream-colored interior of the machine closing in on him and surrounding his head as the world outside disappears from view, and for a moment he has the thought that he’s glad he is not claustrophobic because it’s close quarters in here, and also there are _two strong legs wrapped around his head, trembling and clenching, Bucky’s nose filling with the scent of musk and skin while his eager tongue licks deep into somewhere small and hot and so so tight and oh, fuck— there are those noises,_ Steve’s _little noises, and—_

“—Confirmed, got it.”

The surface moves. This time, Bucky is being rolled out.

His eyes search for Steve as soon as he’s back in Bucky’s field of vision. There are tiny beads of sweat all along Steve’s hairline. He’s breathing harder than Bucky, and to Bucky’s knowledge, Steve has not just had a seizure.

“How long?” Bucky asks.

“About three minutes.”

The numbered objects on the table next to Steve look completely untouched.

He asks Steve, “Which one was it?” but he already knows the answer.

“None of them, Buck.”

Dr. Cho tells him that it will take about a day to develop the images and analyze them. She says she will call Bucky tomorrow once she has the results.

Bucky walks side-by-side with Steve back to their apartment. It’s not even dinner time yet, but he feels very tired. Steve shuts the door behind them and gives Bucky a concerned look, asking him if he wants something to eat, if he’s thirsty.

“Water, yeah. Just water.”

Steve nods and heads into the kitchen. Bucky follows him. The muscles of Steve’s back shift underneath his t-shirt when he opens the cabinet with the drink glasses. Bucky wants to rip the shirt off and trace his lips down Steve’s spine, wants to hear Steve gasp his name. He wonders if that’s something he’s wanted to do to other people before.

The longing is one thing, but Bucky can’t go on like this; the gaps in his memory are too unsustainable. There are things he needs to _know_. Dr. Cho is going to call him into the med bay tomorrow and she’s going to tell him what’s wrong with his brain and Bucky needs to know whatever he can, going in. He’s got to ask the only person who might have answers.

Bucky watches Steve grab a couple of water glasses from the cabinet.

“Did I ever have sex?”

It is only because of his enhanced reflexes that Bucky manages to catch the glass that Steve drops and keep it from shattering on the countertop. Steve stares at Bucky, looks down at the caught glass, and then back up to Bucky’s face.

“Did you… what?”

Bucky should have realized this. He should have understood before he panicked and charged into this conversation that he would end up having to explain _why_ he wants to pick into those specific parts of Steve’s memories, _why_ he wants to know the things that Steve knows about James Buchanan Barnes and the lewder parts of his fallen life. Steve likes to pretend and tell Bucky he’s got carte blanche on asking any questions Bucky needs to ask—anything to help Bucky remember—but then Bucky does ask and Steve gets that look of hope on his face and then Bucky always ends up telling him what made him want to ask in the first place. Sometimes it makes Steve smile, but sometimes it makes his face fall. Information on himself always comes with a price.

It’s just as well, Bucky thinks. There was never a world when he was going to be able to keep this from Steve.

“My _episodes_ ,” Bucky starts. He gently sets the dropped glass down on the countertop, trying his best to exhale evenly. He doesn’t know how he makes eye contact with Steve. “The world around me just kind of goes away. I see things, imagine things, like I said. But they’re things that make me…” He stalls. He thinks of cherries. “Things that make me think of sex.”

Steve’s mouth is just barely hanging open while Bucky speaks, and Bucky almost shivers when he sees Steve’s eyes turn into saucers. He forbids himself from thinking about Steve underneath him, about doing things to Steve to make those eyes grow wide like that. He knows he will think about that later, in bed. With a hand on his cock.

“Thing is,” Bucky continues, “I can’t remember ever having sex.”

A charged moment passes, but Steve’s shoulders relax eventually. His face does a funny thing when he breathes out, and Bucky knows that look. It’s the expression Steve makes but tries to hide each time he realizes that Bucky is missing yet another piece of James.

“Cho knows,” Bucky continues. “I told her, and I’m… I’m sorry, Steve. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you when these things started. It was…”

“It was embarrassing,” Steve finishes for him.

Bucky nods. Steve sighs, and he nods back.

“No, I… I get it, Buck. I probably would have done the same.”

Steve takes the two glasses and walks towards the refrigerator, pulling out the pitcher of filtered water.

“Sit down at the table,” he says, sounding almost resigned. “I’ll bring us some water. We can talk.”

Bucky does as Steve asks. His friend seems to take his time with the pitcher and the water, facing away from Bucky, grabbing a towel and wiping escaped droplets from the side of the glass. Bucky watches from behind as his ribcage expands, and Steve lets out a long breath before turning and walking towards the table.

Steve hands Bucky his glass and sits down.

“You had a different girl on your arm every Saturday.”

It’s not what Bucky expects him to say. He blinks. He takes a drink.

“I had… girlfriends?”

Steve’s pink mouth ticks up at the edge.

“More of ‘em than I could keep track of. From the time we were teenagers. You were a real good dancer, Buck. Every girl in Brooklyn was linin’ up to take a twirl with you.” Steve takes a sip of his own water and then gives Bucky an impish smirk, raising one eyebrow suggestively. “Plenty ‘a nights, you twirled the girls _home_.”

Bucky’s chest feels strange. Something about this definitely does not make sense. Steve says that James Buchanan Barnes went around with women—that he had sex with women—but it is not women that Bucky has thoughts about now. It’s not the lips of women that Bucky is kissing in his dreams. It’s _Steve_.

He keeps his confusion to himself.

“And you?” Bucky asks, for reasons he can’t quite explain.

Steve laughs at that, a genuine crinkle coming to the edges of his eyes.

“Girls didn’t have a lick of interest in a little shrimp like me.”

Bucky… he thinks about that.

“Because you were smaller,” he says, looking for confirmation that his assumption about what women want is correct.

Steve nods and gives him another crooked grin. “Yeah, Buck. All those girls only had eyes for you. Can’t say you didn’t try, though. You were always offering to be my wingman.”

The thought of it surprises Bucky. He can feel it on his face, his own eyebrows crawling towards his hairline.

“I tried to find girlfriends for you?”

Steve laughs. “Sure did,” he says. “You’ve always been a good pal like that.”

There is something about Steve’s face when he says it that makes Bucky want to smile all of a sudden, and perhaps he does smile, because then something about Bucky’s face makes Steve smile, too.

They’re quiet for a moment. Bucky is trying to come up with possible explanations for why someone wouldn’t find a person with Steve’s sweet face attractive when Steve clears his throat and starts talking again.

“But I… ah,” Steve begins, then trails off. He looks awkward all of a sudden, rubbing the back of his neck and shifting his glance back down to the table like he’s thinking about whether he wants to say something. “Guess it looked a little curious, maybe—young, single guy who never had a date. But I can’t say I was heartbroken about it.”

Steve’s demeanor has certainly changed. Bucky watches him fidget with the lip of his glass, his smile gone now. There is a bit of pink beginning to tinge the tops of his cheekbones. Bucky hears what Steve is not saying.

“You weren’t interested in them, either.”

Steve looks up and meets Bucky’s eyes, surprised, but then his expression turns cautious. He looks like he’s searching for something in Bucky’s face, something specific. It does not look like he finds it.

“No,” Steve says, swallowing. “I wasn’t.”

It’s the open look in Steve’s eyes. It always is. Sometimes, the possessive feeling Bucky gets when he sees that look is so intense that it threatens to incinerate him. It’s all the more reason why he shouldn’t ask his next question.

“Did you.” Bucky stops, licks his lips. “Did you have boyfriends?”

Steve’s eyes go wide. He barks out a stark laugh, and Bucky’s brow tightens in confusion at what feels like an odd reaction.

“No, Buck, I…” Steve shakes his head from side to side, blinking out disbelief, and Bucky spots the way his blush has deepened. He wants to reach out and feel the heat of it beneath his fingertips. “Fellas kissin’ on other fellas...”

Steve pauses for a beat, and his face falls softly into something more somber. He looks down into his water glass like he’s looking through a one-way mirror, like he can peer through to the bottom and see Brooklyn, 1939. He shakes his head clear of an unspoken thought and takes a sip.

“Wasn’t really the done thing. Back then.”

Bucky considers what Steve is saying for a moment. He thinks about the couples he sees when he watches movies with Sam, men and women together, mostly. But there are also films and television programs that have shown men together with men and women together with women, although Bucky has seen that far less frequently. It occurs to him for the first time that perhaps the thoughts and dreams he has about Steve might not just be considered wrong, but also _deviant_ —not because Bucky is Bucky and Steve is Steve, but because Bucky and Steve are men.

“It is now,” Bucky tries.

Steve looks away from his glass and back at Bucky’s face. Something in his eyes remains guarded, but also… curious. He looks like he wants to ask Bucky why he said it, but he asks no such thing.

“Mostly, yeah,” Steve agrees. “It’s. It’s a lot better, now.”

—

That night, Bucky lies alone in his bed and tugs down on his heavy balls, and he thinks of Steve’s mouth saying, _“fellas kissin’ on other fellas,”_ of the sound of the consonants tumbling off his pink tongue.

—

Dr. Cho calls Bucky the next day around noon and asks him to come back into her office. He goes, and Steve walks there with him again. Bucky knocks on Cho’s door and is invited in immediately, and as he’s turning the knob, he sees Steve walk to a bench in the hallway and begin to sit down.

“No,” Bucky says. “Please, come in with me. I want you there.”

Steve’s face looks soft when it lights up. He smiles at Bucky when he stands.

“Okay. Let’s go.”

Dr. Cho’s large desk always seems to be very organized. Yesterday there were neat stacks of folders—all of them labeled _James Buchanan Barnes_ —and today she has cleared it and set down a holoscreen device. She swipes around in the air, moving colorful images of Bucky’s brain. It’s stark; he tries to ignore that there are sections that look like they’re missing completely. Instead, he follows Cho’s finger as she points at the two bright red, kidney-shaped spots in the upper area of the screen.

“The brain’s pleasure center,” she says. “Right here. These spots, in the middle of your seizure. You see these colors in people who are being stimulated by sugar or drugs, or other things that cause a release of dopamine.”

Cho pauses and looks between Bucky and Steve, an unspoken question in her face when she subtly gestures towards Steve’s presence. Bucky nods, and she continues.

“Like sex,” she finishes.

Steve shifts in his chair.

“What’s causing it? Why can’t he control it? Are these… is what’s happening to him dangerous?”

Dr. Cho gives Steve a friendly smile. Bucky appreciates the natural way she seems to be able to calm almost anyone, just by projecting an energy.

“Let’s take that one question at a time, okay?”

Cho does something to the holoscreen and the pictures of Bucky’s fucked brain go away. They are replaced by an image that Bucky instantly recognizes as his own metal arm—the old Hydra arm, actually—no longer on his body but halfway disassembled across a table.

“Your old prosthetic,” she begins. “Hydra used it as more than just a weapon. You already know about some of the things we found inside there. The GPS tracker, the killswitch. You’ll also remember we found a pharmaceutical blood pump.”

Bucky has to look away from the screen and off to the side. Ice crawls down his spine. He doesn’t know if it’s from the implications of Cho’s words or from seeing the gooseflesh creeping up Steve’s arm.

“We only recently finished cataloguing all the different chemicals they were putting inside you. Some of them, we still don’t understand the purpose of. But now that we know about these seizures, and the nature of the… _things_ you’re seeing, we can identify one of compounds that we were lost on before.”

There is more swiping, the dissected arm now gone, so Bucky looks back at Cho’s screen. Lines and letters. Something that looks like chemistry. She points to the screen and says a long, technical-sounding word that Bucky forgets the instant he hears it. He doubts the name is what’s important.

“We think Hydra wanted to do everything possible to keep you from getting distracted on assignments. We knew about the appetite suppressants they used, and the nutrition injections, but this is new. This one they kept pumping into your bloodstream _any_ time you were out of cryo, even when you weren’t actively on a mission.”

“Tell us what they did to him, please,” Steve cuts in, impatiently polite and biting down on the end of each word.

Cho nods at Steve but continues to address her words directly to Bucky.

“You’ve been kept chemically castrated for seventy years. Pharmaceutical suppressants.”

It makes sense. Of course it does. Hydra was nothing if not efficient. Bucky hadn’t paid sex a single thought until two weeks ago, but now that it consumes his every waking hour, he would think it strange if his handlers _didn’t_ try to stomp that splendor out of him. He should never have expected less.

“When you took off the arm, the chemicals went with it,” Bucky voices. Cho nods her confirmation. “Why aren’t I just feeling normal? Other people don’t… think about it like—like _this_.”

Cho swipes again, returning the screen to the abstract of colors Bucky now knows to be his brain on Steve Rogers.

“These neurological processes were completely turned off for the Winter Soldier. There are parts of your brain that practically atrophied, and if you weren’t enhanced, I’d say that kind brain damage was irreversible.” Cho gives Bucky a pointed look. “Clearly it’s not. Not in you. But now that your mind is remembering how to turn on those processes again, it’s confused, and the wealth of other neurological damage that you have is preventing your body from handling it correctly. Thoughts of sex are getting stuck in the neural loops of trauma.” She sits back in her chair and sighs. “It’s a flood, unfortunately. Hormones, endorphins. You are essentially going through a second puberty, just… all at once.”

Cho lets that sit in the air for a long while. Bucky thinks about these things, about the reality that his brain is so fucked up that it can’t handle him looking at fruit without wanting to ram his dick down his best friend’s throat. Steve’s breathing sounds very still in the chair next to him.

Bucky wonders what the Soldier would have been like if Hydra had not cut off his balls from the inside. Would he have had sex? Would he have finished his missions and then slunk off to pick up men with red lips and blue eyes and big chests so he could stick his tongue in their mouths?

Would the Soldier have remembered _Steve_?

“What can we do?” Steve asks. “Will the seizures stop? Will they go away?”

The doctor opens a drawer next to her and pulls out an orange plastic bottle, pills. Again.

“I can give you something for the anxiety it’s causing, Bucky. I _could_ give you anticonvulsants, but the absence seizures are actually protecting you from worse ways of experiencing this. They are your body’s way of handling the shock.” Cho slides the little bottle across the desk, but Bucky doesn’t pick it up. “The good news is that these episodes have to eventually peter out. I don’t know how long it will take. We’ll need to monitor the situation and hope that it doesn’t get worse before it gets better, but even then…” She winces and gives an apologetic shrug. “I doubt you’ll like the alternative options.”

Bucky thinks of a Chair. Steve makes a quiet sound that is almost like a growl. Bucky shakes his head at Cho.

“Okay,” he says. “Yeah. Thank you.”

Everyone stands. Steve looks over at Bucky and then looks at the pill bottle, reaching out and pocketing it. Bucky knows he’ll find it next to his own sink later.

Steve has already made it to the doorway, Bucky behind him, when Bucky pauses and turns back.

“My memories,” he says to Cho. “My… sex memories. Will they come back?”

Steve freezes two steps short of the hallway. Bucky can feel it and hear it, even if he can’t see it. The doctor’s expression turns into something almost interested as she sits back against the edge of her desk.

“As with all your lost memories, any of them could come back to you—awake, asleep. Any time. Some of them may never return. But based on the unique nature of your… situation.” Cho smirks at him. It is still a kind smile. “Yes. I think it’s likely your brain will prioritize the sexual memories first.”

Bucky doesn’t know if her answer is a good thing or a bad thing. He suspects he’s going to find out.

Steve is odd on the walk back. He’s silent, but in a more tense way than he normally is—around Bucky, at least. Perhaps he is thinking about Hydra, or the colorful Rorschach of Bucky’s brain. Perhaps he is thinking about their conversation at the kitchen table the night before. Perhaps he is thinking about all the sex that James Buchanan Barnes loved to have with women.

Steve is still stiff even after they get back the apartment. He’s trying to hide it, Bucky can tell, but he’s doing a poor job if it.

They put on the television for a while and sit together, still in silence. Bucky isn’t paying attention to the show, and he doesn’t think Steve is either. No. Steve is fidgeting a lot and taking very shallow-sounding breaths. The tension radiating off his body is so confusing and strange that Bucky is almost relieved when Steve gets up after ten minutes.

“I gotta do some things. Paperwork for the team. I’ll be back later.”

“Steve.”

Bucky shouldn’t do it. He shouldn’t go there. It’s bad enough that Steve knows that Bucky is walking around having mind-fucked daydreams about sweat and skin. Then again, what does Bucky have to lose at this point?

( _Steve_ , his mind supplies. He could lose Steve. Bucky is self-destructive enough to do this anyways, thanks to the wreck of a human mind that seventy years of torture has left him with.)

Steve halts on his way out of the door. He turns back.

“Yeah, Buck?”

Bucky doesn’t say anything else for a minute. He takes in the picture of Steve in front of him, locking it away in his mind as a new memory, because he can do that now. Steve isn’t relaxed, isn’t smiling, isn’t any of the things that Bucky craves to see when he looks at his best friend. His shoulders are squared instead, the line of his body rigid—but there is still that vulnerable window in the blue of his eyes that is there any time Bucky calls out Steve’s name.

“You didn’t have boyfriends,” Bucky says, repeating what Steve had told him before. “Did you ever have me?”

Steve’s face doesn’t pink up this time. It goes pale, draining itself of all color. Bucky can see the breath stutter in his throat as Steve tries to hold on to a captain’s composure.

The window in Steve’s eyes is still open. Bucky looks through it, and he finds an old hurt, buried deep inside. He doesn’t ask who gave it to him.

“No,” comes Steve’s answer, his voice hoarse out of nowhere. “Not like that. But we… helped each other out. Sometimes.”

Bucky doesn’t understand what that means. He’s not sure he would have asked if given the chance—if Steve hadn’t nodded and walked out the door.

* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Shit just got real. Welp.
> 
> Ch. 5 Warning: Seriously dark and depressing inner angst ahead.


	5. Furnace

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bucky slips under.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you are sensitive to themes related to sex addiction or even porn addiction (neither of which Bucky actually suffers from, but he does experience very similar compulsion issues), please tread carefully while reading the remainder of this story.

* * *

Bucky stops keeping count.

The visions and their fallout become Bucky’s life. They overpower him. They bend him in arcs, forward and backward.

They eat him _alive_.

The seizures become more frequent _—_ jarringly so. Bucky resorts to spending his days in the apartment in an attempt to preserve the last dregs of his dignity, sequestering himself away from any public eye that might land on him whenever his brain chokes out in the middle of a task and boils over with Steve’s skin and flesh, scalding him, making his cock get fat in his jeans. No one needs to see him like this.

In sleep, the visions come in dreams. They materialize as any number of depraved, sweaty things, waking Bucky three or four times a night, lingering long after his eyes are open and haunting his conscious mind while he pulls on his dick and comes almost dry. Sometimes it’s kissing, sometimes it’s more. Sometimes it’s holding Steve down and swallowing Steve’s cock. Sometimes it’s fucking Steve’s throat until he gags and pleads and cries. There are dreams where Bucky says things that make Steve blush down to his tits _—“Look how hard you made me, baby, look at what you went and did”—_ and there are dreams where Steve talks to him, where Steve begs, _“please, Buck, please let me taste you,”_ and, _“touch me, I want it, make me come on my face.”_

The first time he dreams of what it would feel like to stick his cock inside Steve, Bucky is not asleep. He is awake and he is not having a seizure and he is as lucid as someone with seventy years of brain damage can possibly be. It is a free man’s thought, and it’s pure hedonism, full of lewd imaginings and sticky noises and fucked-out groaning and begging. He’s not alone when it happens, but he wishes he were—wishes he were back on his bed with his dick in his fist so he could jack off enough times to make the image go away. Instead he’s seated where he is, stupidly straying from the safety of his room to attend an ill-advised group dinner, listening to Sam talking at the far end of the table and saying things that make Steve laugh.

(Bucky likes Sam. He really, really does. Bucky cuts up his steak and watches Sam chuckle and squeeze at the back of Steve’s neck. Bucky wishes he had a bigger knife in his hand.)

Bucky stops coming to dinner.

Steve avoids him the first few days after the visit with Dr. Cho. It’s not blatant avoidance, but it’s real, and Steve is bad at hiding it. He excuses himself away to this place and that, conjures up meetings he has to attend, busies himself with unnecessary equipment maintenance. Bucky doesn’t know why Steve is doing it, but he guesses it’s because Steve doesn’t want to be around when Bucky is springing fat bulges in his sweats six times a day. Bucky doesn’t blame him; he doesn’t want to be around himself either. He would give his flesh arm to be able to step out of his own body each time he has to pull down his boxers and take his chafed dick in hand, degrading and defiling his best friend in his mind and wringing out pleasure that burns more than it sates.

Steve’s got the right idea with staying away.

Then comes an afternoon that finds Bucky sitting on his bed with the door to his room open—a rarity—fresh out of his third cold shower of the day and trying to distract himself with a book when Steve appears, knocking on the open doorway and leaning against the frame. Steve gives him a soft, _“Hey, Buck,”_ and when Bucky looks up, he sees guilt on Steve’s face. There’s a sense of disappointment in his eyes that looks far too repentant to be directed at anyone but himself. He asks Bucky if he wants to watch a movie—“Just the two of us, promise”—and Bucky accepts before he can think better of it. Steve smiles. They watch _Three Men and a Baby_.

Steve doesn’t avoid Bucky after that. He is more than Bucky deserves.

They start spending a lot of time in front of the television together, sometimes quiet and watching what’s on, other times talking. Steve is good at telling stories that take Bucky’s mind off of things. It’s helpful, but it can’t make the seizures go away.

Bucky gives up on feeling embarrassed. The only emotions he’s left with after emerging from a skin-slick apparition while Steve is around are those of guilt and gratitude, because he can check out in the middle of conversation and come back mind-fucked and hard next to Steve on the couch and Steve won’t say a damn thing. Steve won’t leave the room. He won’t even scoot away. Steve will blush and avert his eyes as though to allow Bucky privacy, and when it’s over he’ll pick right up where they left off, talking about anything and nothing as though the whole thing never happened.

(There is one time, an especially short episode, when Steve does not avert his gaze; not quickly enough, at least. The room re-materializes around Bucky to reveal Steve with his eyes open and cast down, staring at the lascivious tenting of Bucky’s crotch with a look of some kind on his face. Bucky’s fucked-open brain pretends it’s a look of hunger—even when sure it cannot be.)

Steve will carry on whatever conversation they we’re just having. He won’t ask Bucky where he’s going when he gets up from the couch five minutes later, sweating, walking to his room to quietly shut himself away. He’ll be in the kitchen when Bucky emerges, and he’ll ask if chicken is okay for dinner. Steve tiptoes around it, but he doesn’t shy away, and the whole thing is unfathomably awkward. It’s also unfathomably kind.

  
Bucky wants to fuck him _raw_.

—

This dream is different _._

_The colors are different, brighter, and Bucky is behind his own eyes. He is sitting. A body is draped across his lap, young and alive, strangely feverish. It’s the body of a man, perhaps an older boy. He is faceless and bird-boned and naked, breathing hard in Bucky’s arms. A breeze blows through an open window. Starlight follows behind it, illuminating the warmth of this beautiful stranger’s skin._

_A riot of noise begins to carve paths inside Bucky’s head. It is the sound of his own thoughts, and they tell him that this boy is too thin, that the shape of his ribs is far too sharp, but also that he looks exactly the way Bucky has imagined angels looking since he first heard his priest describe them. Something happens, something clicks. He hears the rumble of a gearshift turning the cogs in the dream. The image beneath him dissolves._

_He is James Buchanan Barnes, kneeling between long rows of wooden benches. Between pews. His knees rest on tattered velvet as Brooklyn sunshine pours through cracked, painted glass, falling on the short stature of a boy kneeling beside him. He turns, but the gears click again, reversing. The voice of prayer fades before it can be heard and then Bucky is back where he started, holding a starved and naked angel in his arms, wishing he could kiss the breathy sounds spilling from divine, red lips. They are all he can see of his face._

_He thinks the man must be distressed until he listens closer to his noises—to his moans—and he looks down the lines of that fragile, perfect body. A mostly limp cock rests against the man’s concave stomach. The picture is so captivating that he almost misses the strangest part of the dream, that his own left arm is made of flesh, and it’s dysphoric. He can feel the bone inside. His whole body is different, actually, not thin and bared like the boy in his arms but lean and clothed, tall, with none of the bulk of the Soldier. He is not Bucky here, his mind reminds him. Not Bucky only. He is James Buchanan Barnes._

_Bucky is beginning to know why this dream is so different when a velvety heat squeezes two of his flesh fingers, fluttery, tight. His eyes drift down further to find his left arm between the boy’s legs, his hand halfway out of sight. Something instinctual tells him to curl those fingers, so he does—he crooks them up inside the place they are buried with a confidence that says he has done this before. It’s the right thing to do, judging by the sounds that come from his faceless man. The pulse and the pressure of his touch make that gorgeous body squirm and draw out tender noises, low and soft, astonishingly familiar. Bucky cannot place them. He does it again, then again, building up a purposeful rhythm. He feels almost stoic inside the memory of himself while his lover falls apart._

_“C’mon, sweetheart,” his own voice whispers. “C’mon, Stevie.”_

_That half-hard cock twitches, then releases. There is a cry of unadulterated bliss._

Bucky wakes.

—

Steve makes pasta for dinner one night. It tastes very good. Bucky decides that he likes the flavors of red sauce on things that Steve cooks, and he likes the spices Steve uses. He tells Steve all of this, and then he immediately regrets it, because those words are a compliment and compliments always make Steve blush.

Bucky is grateful for the height of the kitchen counters. He can stand next to Steve at the sink while Steve washes dishes and he can press his hips into the cabinets, hiding his cock and holding a towel, pretending to think only of drying clean pots and plates as Steve passes each one to him.

“—So then Clint’s comms go out, right? And Nat is back in the jet tryin’ to figure out if he’s down, or if he’s compromised, and none of us even had ears on his last location—”

Bucky is shit at pretending.

“You said,” Bucky blurts, interrupting Steve’s story. “You said that we used to... ‘help each other out.’ What did you mean?”

The sponge slips from Steve’s hand and lands in the sink. He leaves the faucet running when he turns his head towards Bucky, a look in his eyes like he’s just been pinned to a wall.

Bucky would like very much to pin Steve to a wall. He wonders if the cabinet door is wet with how much his dick is leaking in his pants.

“Did you,” Steve starts, stopping to wet his dry mouth. “Did you remember something?”

Bucky’s not sure how to answer. He does not like to lie to Steve, because Steve doesn’t lie to him.

“I don’t know,” he says. “I had a dream. But I’m not sure what it was to me.”

Steve searches his face like he’s trying to figure out if Bucky is telling the truth. Bucky is thankful Steve looks there, instead of looking down.

He gives Bucky a slow nod and returns his eyes to the sink, retrieving his sponge. Steve sets to work cleaning the stockpot as he begins to speak.

“My body before the serum… It was pretty messed up. A lot of things didn’t work the way they were supposed to work. Couldn’t breathe right, couldn’t see right. Looked all crooked when I stood up straight.”

Steve’s mouth tilts up as he talks, smirking down at the dishes. It would seem as though he were remembering happy past times rather recounting decades of hardship if not for the rueful tone in his smile. Bucky recalls the faceless, thin body that was strewn across his lap, remembering the exact count of his ribs, straining and pulling on the wire mesh of the memory until he picks up on the slight wheeze beneath the boy’s gasping. Bucky had missed that, the first time.

“Had issues with my ticker, too,” Steve goes on. “My heart couldn’t always get blood moving the way it should, not to all the right places. That part got worse the older I got. Sometimes I couldn’t… um.” His face begins to heat, and he waves a soapy hand down in the direction of his own hips—his own groin. “I couldn’t always, you know. Get hard. Pretty damn frustrating. Hard for a hot-blooded teenaged kid to pull one off if he can’t get it up first.”

Steve chuckles humorlessly and sets the clean pot aside. The more impulsive parts of Bucky want to ask Steve if _can’t get it up_ looked like a half-hard cock resting against a concave stomach. He picks up the pot instead, drying it in silence.

“Think I was nineteen when I first cracked a joke about my broken dick to you,” Steve’s eyes remain on the sink, dutifully scrubbing at dinner plates now. “Maybe eighteen. That was all it was supposed to be, just a joke. But then you… you started sayin’ there were some things I could do to, um. To stimulate things. Get things moving and goin’, even when I was stuck all limp.”

Steve goes to pass a clean plate to Bucky, but this time he makes eye contact as he hands it over. His bottom lip looks slick the way it always does when Steve has been licking at it nervously.

“You offered to… show me,” Steve says. His cheeks are so pink. “I took you up on it. Tried it myself, too, but…” He looks away and shakes his head, turning back to the stack of plates. “Turned out you were a lot better at gettin’ it right than I was. Maybe my arms were too short.”

Bucky finds himself curling the middle and index fingers of his flesh hand over the rim of the dried dish as he listens, crooking them, mimicking the practiced movements of a remembered version of himself just the way he had with a dreamed-up lover hot around his hand.

“How often?”

If Steve is surprised by Bucky’s question, he doesn’t show it.

“Can’t say I counted. Maybe once a month after that first time. Kept it up like that until you left for the war.”

Steve hands him another plate and grabs the last dish. He doesn’t say anything else, doesn’t add to it, so Bucky figures it’s alright if he asks something more.

“You said… you said we helped each _other_ out. Was there something else?”

This time Steve does tense. He doesn’t answer for a long while, laser-focused on scrubbing the grit from the plate. He says nothing at all until it’s good and clean and he’s handing it to Bucky, rinsing his own hands and turning the sink off.

“Sometimes you’d get hard when we’d do it,” he says, pretending it’s nothing but sounding hollow, not meeting Bucky’s eyes as he wipes his fingers with a paper towel. “You’d let me stick my bony hand in your pants, after. Let me bring you off.”

Steve tosses the paper towel in the trash and walks off without another word, his posture stiff, leaving Bucky to dry the last dish. He finishes his task slowly, thinking through all the things Steve could have meant by _you’d let me_. It is quiet in the kitchen. Bucky assumes that Steve has left the room until he hears the refrigerator opening and the tell-tale sounds of a water glass filling up.

“Did we ever kiss?”

The refrigerator door closes. There are no more sounds for a moment, no footsteps. There is no walking away.

“I loved you,” comes Steve’s answer from behind.

Bucky stays silent. The plate is as dry as it can ever possibly get, so he places it on the rack with the rest. It feels like the bravest thing he’s ever done—braver than fleeing Hydra, even—to turn around and meet Steve’s eyes.

“Did I know?” Bucky asks.

Steve’s face is… empty. It isn’t hopeful, it isn’t pained. It isn’t heart-broken. It’s as though Steve has built a barrier of glass between their two bodies and knows that Bucky can’t hurt him from where he stands.

“I don’t know,” Steve says. “But I’d always hoped you did.”

Bucky says nothing. He doesn’t think there is room for response, even if he knew enough about who he is and who he’s been to say anything at all. It feels like he is stuck behind this wall Steve has built, trapped and screaming, unable to move as he watches Steve leave.

He stands alone in the kitchen for ten long minutes, realizing it was not Steve who built it.

—

Steve leaves for a mission that night while Bucky is sleeping. Bucky knows this not because the sounds of Steve moving awaken him from dreams of cock and spit, but because Steve leaves him a note.

_Natasha called, something popped up on the radar. I’ll be back in a few days. A week, max._

That’s all of it, until Bucky sets the note back down on the coffee table and notices writing on the back. He turns it over. Steve’s handwriting looks hurried.

_Buck—_

_There is so much I want to say and I have to go now, but I’m sorry. I’m so damn sorry. I should never have put that on you. ~~I should have told you that I still~~ I shouldn’t have added to all the things you’re already dealing with. I know I walked out and I’m sorry for that, too. I was ashamed._

_I want to be there for you. I hope you can forget this. I’m sorry._

_I’ll see you soon._

_\- Steve_

It’s heartfelt. It’s honest. It’s unnecessarily contrite. He thinks of Steve scribbling it all down for him—rushed, halfway into his uniform, pinched little brow on his face with a pen in his wet mouth as he anxiously searches for the right thing to say—and Bucky’s cock turns to nails. He sits with a steel erection for the next seven hours, ignoring it, until finally he shoves a hand in his pants on Steve’s empty bed and tugs out the most horrible, ball-twisting orgasm of his waking life.

Bucky takes Cho’s anxiety pills before bed that night for the first time. He hates the way they make him feel, but the nearly dreamless sleep they provide is such unspeakable bliss that he keeps taking them.

He spends the next six days alone in their apartment, halfway stoned and feeling lifeless, waiting for his friend to come back.

—

_The colors in this dream are different, but not for the same reasons as before. Here, there are no colors at all._

_Eyes cannot see color where there is no light._

_Bucky knows this place. Bucky knows it because the Soldier knows it—knows darkness. Darkness is where the handlers keep him. The Soldier gets to freeze or the Soldier gets to scream awake, but when he is awake and he is not killing, the dark is where the Soldier stays._

_It is strategic, he knows. Confine your asset in the dark until you need to use it, deprive it of its senses, isolate it. Keep it blank. An asset will cooperate when you promise to show it light._

_The handlers tell him a mission is coming. The Soldier will wait here for his orders, in this room, in this dark. The Soldier will look for nothing and think of nothing and fight for nothing except for Hydra. It gives the Soldier purpose. He looks forward to his orders. Until then, the Soldier waits._

_He has learned to keep his assessment skills sharp with counting exercises. He walks the perimeter of the room—eight paces forward, five paces left, eight paces forward, five paces left—and he counts the cracks in the concrete walls. There are no windows in this room, no unearned reward of light, so the Soldier uses the tactile fingertips of his inferior arm to do the counting._

_Seven cracks in the first eight paces. Three in the next five. Good. Four cracks the next eight paces. Two cracks in—_

_Concrete shifts beneath the Soldier’s hand. A piece of this wall has lost integrity. There should not be a third crack—the Soldier has counted them twenty-two times—but there is._

_He runs his fingers over the aberration and finds pieces that wobble. Curious, stupid, the Soldier pushes on it. A moderate mass—twelve and one-half kilograms, perhaps—falls inward onto the ground._

_A sliver of luminance shines into the darkness, pale and bright and blue. It is not sunlight, and it is not fluorescence. It must be night over Siberia, with the moon and the stars high up in the sky._

_The illegal beam of light stretches across the room’s eight paces and shines itself on the opposite wall, the shape of it cast ragged and narrow by broken concrete._

_The Soldier crosses, eight paces. He touches it._

_The light reflects off his metal hand, silver and blue. It is the most brilliant blue the Soldier has seen in permitted memory—except it is not. Something in his programming skips, malfunctions. The Soldier sees a face. The Soldier sees_ eyes _._

_On the cheeks below them, the Soldier sees pink._

_There are voices nearing. The face and its many colors are gone. The sound of concrete hitting the floor had made noise, and now the handlers are on their way._

_The Soldier yanks his hand away as though he’s been burned, and perhaps he has. Perhaps his handlers will burn him, too. The Soldier will be punished, he is aware, but for once he feels fear—not of pain, but of the unknown. The Soldier knows the punishment for noncompliance. He does not know the punishment for touching forbidden light._

_The Soldier folds himself into the corner of the room that is furthest from the break in code. The voices grow louder._

_The door to the dark opens with a bang._

—

Steve returns in the afternoon on day seven. He walks through the door in a dirty uniform and finds Bucky sitting on the couch, lights off, staring at a powered-down television. Steve’s note is still on the coffee table, just as he left it, except the front side is facing down.

Bucky feels Steve look him over as he enters the room. He wonders if he looks how he feels: beaten, trodden. Sunken and gray. He’s had three seizures and four shitty orgasms today already, and he honestly doesn’t know if his dick is hard in his sweats but if it is, Steve can see it. Steve says nothing of it.

His eyes follow Steve’s form as he sets down his shield before walking over to Bucky. He looks between Bucky and the empty television screen and slowly sits down next to him, telegraphing each movement. Steve’s body radiates warmth and fatigue.

“Hey, Buck,” Steve greets softly. “Can I hug you?”

Bucky stares at him for a second—more than a second, actually. He stares until he realizes he’s staring while Steve waits for an answer. Steve’s face is so open, so sincere, and Bucky _wants_ with a blunt kind of savagery to run his fingertips over Steve’s lips. He wants to kiss them, to bite them. He wants to taste them and lick them open and use the inside of Steve’s mouth like he owns it, but he doesn’t. He can’t. He knows that if he ever started kissing Steve then he would never be able to stop, even if Steve was wrong enough to let him start in the first place.

He nods with all the energy of an empty man cracked in half. Steve smiles, at least, a careful thing. He leans forward, and then Bucky is enveloped in Steve’s strong, warm arms. He closes his eyes and keeps his hands to himself.

Some part of it hurts. Then again, so does coming home.

* * *

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all so much for sticking with me so far. There is one last (13k word) piece coming up. 
> 
> I promise you will find happiness on the other end of Bucky's rope.


	6. Homecoming

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The final installment, taking place not long after the previous events.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Mildly Dubious Consent:** I have chosen to use this tag because the communication factor here is practically nonexistent, and Bucky is not of sound mind. However, please be advised that all parties very, very much want everything that is about to happen. The core of these characters' desires exists independently of Bucky's affliction.

  
  


* * *

There is not an exact moment that Bucky realizes he’s awake.

It’s a series of realizations, really, things that dawn on him as living air instead of the viscosity of dreams. But there is one thing he immediately notices once he fully accepts that he is conscious.

Bucky is standing in Steve’s bedroom.

The room is obviously not his own. The walls in Bucky’s bedroom are a dark neutral brown, whereas Steve’s walls are navy blue. He sees that it is navy blue that surrounds him now, even if the hue of it is barely visible in the dark, the walls and furniture lit only by choppy rays of night streaming through the window blinds.

Bucky examines himself. His chest is heaving. He can hear himself gasping for a steady breath, trying and failing to swallow the turbid fantasy of the dream that had carried him on his feet to cross the hallway between their bedrooms. Looking around blearily at his surroundings, he tries to focus on something singular, something grounding. When he takes stock of his own body he finds that he is wearing only the boxer briefs he fell asleep in. They are tented, he notes, struggling fabric stretched over his perpetual nocturnal arousal. The erection pulses with a dull pain, as it always does.

He is standing on his right leg while the left is propped up with the knee pressing into the edge of a mattress. The mattress belongs to a large bed, and Bucky is standing at its foot, nearly leaning forward.

His best friend Steve is lying in this bed. Steve—like Bucky—is awake.

The heavy rise and fall of Bucky’s chest comes to a standstill when his eyes find Steve’s prone form, and he is helpless to look away, even if that’s what he wanted.

The clean but mussed white linen surrounding Steve is lit only by the brilliance of the night sky outside. He appears to be completely naked, bared to the chill of the room with only a thin, rucked-up sheet strewn across his hips, a small preservation of modesty. A wild beam of starlight streaming through the window scatters across his thick thighs, which are splayed open in a way that looks far too vulnerable to befit a sleeping soldier. The light and its shadow betray the shape of what couldn’t be an erection beneath the fabric.

Steve Rogers’s wide eyes find a way to be blue even when they are hidden in dark. They are the only tone about the man that is colored cool. The flush across his blond-stubbled cheeks is warm, extending down to his open, bared neck, to his hard chest with its rosy nipples. The wet red of his lips looks hot to the touch where Steve’s mouth hangs open, drawing in shallow breaths. Bucky cannot stare at those lips for long before his oxygen levels get so low that his own lips go pale.

Steve hasn’t moved since Bucky has become aware of his presence. He is halfway propped up on his forearms, as though Steve were intending to sit up before thinking better of it. It’s only then that Bucky notices the placement of his own hands. His flesh-and-skin fist is clenched in the sheets while the matte black of his metal arm hovers in front of him, fingers spread, stock-still as it hangs halfway between his own body and Steve’s. Bucky wonders what the dream version of himself had planned to do in this room.

Even in his dream-shaken state, Bucky could think up one hundred different words to describe Steve’s beauty: angelic, ethereal, pure. Pink, even in the dark. The thing he cannot describe is the expression on Steve’s face.

 _Fear_ isn’t the right word. It’s also not wrong. Bucky’s broken brain must be poisoning his eyesight again because _hunger_ cannot be right, it can’t—even if Bucky can see it there, pushing out, crushed up against the surface of fear—because Steve is looking at a wild animal that has prowled into his room in the middle of the night, in search of prey, with enough strength and brutal, unchecked desire to overcome Steve’s body if he tried. _Hunger_ must look different than Bucky thinks it does.

“Bucky.”

He can hear the trepidation in Steve’s voice just the same as he can see the slowly growing gap between Steve’s thighs, two physical reactions so vividly opposed to one other. It does not make sense. Any moment now Steve will cover himself and he’ll shout, and then he’ll tackle Bucky to the ground, and then he’ll put the Soldier back in chains, but then Steve _doesn’t_ do that, and then—and then—

Bucky is moving before he can think to stop himself. He is leaning forward into that sleep-thick calling of his name, crawling between the enticing ‘v’ of Steve’s strong legs, a shape which looks far more inviting than Steve surely means it to be. Bucky doesn’t register that he has moved at all until a hand—his left hand—settles itself atop his friend’s knee. Steve’s entire body goes rigid.

Bucky’s blood freezes. It shatters.

Then Steve lets out a soft, low noise. His body relaxes, and he opens his thighs just a sweet fraction wider. His eyes flutter closed for only a second before they’re staring up at Bucky, cautious and attentive but with something in his lidded gaze that looks almost wild in its own way. Steve opens his mouth.

“You can, Buck.”

All of the shards of Bucky’s blood melt, fluid inside his veins.

The flesh of Steve’s leg feels hot beneath Bucky’s palm, warming the metal. His eyes crawl from Steve’s earnest face to look down at the skin that he’s touching. Bucky squeezes the knee, testing that it’s real, and then looks back to Steve’s face.

“What… what do you.”

They’re the first words Bucky has said since waking up in Steve’s room, and they feel less like a broken question than a test of his own voice. He sounds gravelly, thick, but something about hearing Bucky speak seems to wipe out what’s left of the healthy caution in Steve’s features. It’s suicide.

“You can,” Steve repeats, letting out a long breath with a lick to his own lips. “I know it’s been, um, hard for you, but I can… I want to help. Anything. Everything.” The blue of Steve’s eyes sears like the center of a flame. “Whatever you want to do, you can.”

Bucky’s exhale crashes inside his own ears. He looks back at his hand where it’s frozen atop the bend of Steve’s leg and finds himself moving that thumb, stroking, the touch sensors in his new prosthetic telling Bucky everything he’s ever wanted to know about the soft skin of Steve’s inner knee—except for how it tastes—and it’s so much more than Bucky should be given. He closes his eyes against it.

“Steve.”

The man whose name he calls sits up on his elbows, and Bucky’s eyes open to watch. It’s a small movement, but it lessens the distance between their faces by at least another foot. Every cell in Bucky’s body is screaming at him, ripping and dying, for him to close the gap completely. He stays where he is, even if that means he’s shaking with the effort of it.

“It’s okay, Buck,” Steve says. His voice is so calm now. It makes no sense. “Really. You were dreaming, I think. But you’re awake now, you’re with me, you’re okay. We’re okay.”

Steve’s eyes are far too honest when he speaks. It scares Bucky. It makes him worried that Steve actually wants the things he’s offered so freely in the dead of the night, and it’s growing hard to believe that he doesn’t when Steve’s lashes lay that low.

“I don’t…”

There is no end to Bucky’s sentence. He speaks in the negative while his body moves in the affirmative, his idle right hand traveling now, covering Steve’s other knee. It’s his flesh hand; skin, touching skin. Bucky is weak.

Steve’s eyes sink down to the new point of contact, thinking or waiting or hoping. He looks back up.

“You can just look, if that’s all you want. Or we can talk. Or we can go back to sleep, or…”

There is an almost imperceptible tilt to Steve’s head as he trails off; consideration. He moves one of his own hands then—gradually, carefully—and he encircles Bucky’s flesh-and-blood wrist with his long fingers.

“Or you can touch me.”

Against his better, harsher judgement, Bucky allows Steve to guide his open palm from Steve’s knee to rest against Steve’s sternum. A gasp escapes someone’s throat at the touch.

Steve’s chest feels like flames beneath Bucky’s hand. It reminds him of fire, of _fever_ , and for the flash of one instant Bucky sees a memory—something lost, something James Buchanan Barnes owned in the form of a flushed and sweaty boy filling up his arms. It was Steve, Bucky knows. He’d been there to press an ice pack to young Steve Rogers’s forehead, cooling his small body with its labored breathing, nothing in the world to ease his pain save for his friend’s touch. The vision dissolves, but Bucky gets to keep it.

“You can touch,” Steve says. His register is higher, and his breathing feels heavier in the chest beneath Bucky’s hand. “Wherever, whatever. And, I...” He covers Bucky’s hand with his own, warm and broad, the pads of his fingers stroking lightly over Bucky’s knuckles. “I can touch you, if you want. Anything you wanna do, Buck. We can.”

Anything _—anything,_ and the fucked up part is that Bucky knows he means it. Steve would let him look, anywhere Bucky wants. Steve would— _is_ letting Bucky touch. He knows he should end this right now, should ask Steve all of the questions that start with ‘why’: why the hell he would hand over his own body in such reckless fashion, why he would offer these things to someone who… wants so much, would take so much. Craves so much. He should ask Steve why he would give this to someone who has no idea what he’s doing, who is unpredictable and damaged and almost certainly dangerous, someone who may not know when or how to stop. Steve should give this to someone else, maybe. But not to him.

But Bucky does not ask. He does not ask, firstly, because he is selfish. He is a starving man. He wants to look at Steve like this and touch Steve like this, wants to do things to Steve that Bucky doesn’t even have names or words for.

He does not ask, secondly, because the mere thought of anyone else doing those things to Steve makes Bucky want to burn civilization and all its history to the ground. He would put the Soldier’s sins to shame.

“I want to,” Bucky whispers. “I shouldn’t. I could hurt you.”

Steve sits up further, and for one heart-stopping second, Bucky thinks that Steve is going to kiss him. He doesn’t. Steve stops with their faces maybe half a foot apart, hand still covering Bucky’s hand, pressing it into Steve’s chest. He is sitting while Bucky is still kneeling and he looks upward at Bucky’s lips, then further to meet his eyes.

“You’re not gonna hurt me, Buck.”

Steve stays in that position, sharing Bucky’s space and breathing in the same air. Bucky begins to consider that perhaps Steve is waiting for _Bucky_ to kiss _him_ , and then he thinks about that—wonders if he could even do it—but he gets dizzy at the reality of Steve’s mouth being this close. He casts his eyes down instead and stares at the place where their hands are touching, where only Steve’s flesh and bone are separating Bucky’s fingers from wrapping around that tender, naked heart.

Steve sees where Bucky is staring, and Bucky can feel him studying his face. When Steve moves their hands it is slow, experimental, a gentle dragging of Bucky’s fingers and palm across the smooth skin of his hairless chest and then up the curve of one full, solid pectoral.

It’s Steve’s gasp that finally does it, the key in the ignition. It’s the hitch inside the secret breath that Steve sucks in when Bucky’s fingertips brush over the pebbled pink of his nipple. It’s the shocked pleasure in the sound, the quiet whine beneath it, the way it steals the air out of their collective space and draws it inside of Steve’s gorgeous, strong lungs and makes his chest rise, pushing it further into Bucky’s palm.

It’s Steve’s gasp that finally snaps what is left of Bucky’s control, and with a primal noise that is surely more monster than man, Bucky starts in the place where it all began for him.

He starts with Steve’s lips.

Bucky closes the distance between them in a flash, racing to do every single thing he’s wanted to do to Steve’s mouth for what feels like forever, to explore, to _plunder_ —but he pulls himself back at just a brush of lips. He pauses because he cannot stop his left hand from flying up to grab Steve’s chin, locking Steve’s stubbled jaw in his grasp. The hold is firm and demanding, and so steady it surprises even Bucky. Steve lets it happen; his body surrenders. There is not an ounce of tension or self-preservation in Steve as he allows Bucky to hold his slack-muscled face, to take his time staring at Steve’s lips, disbelieving that they are real and here, before him, breathing out against his own. Steve’s mouth is no longer a fantasy, even if it is just as full and candy red as the mouth in Bucky’s dreams. It would look even better kiss-bitten, Bucky thinks.

Bucky stares. He bites.

Steve lets go of a punched-out whimper as he meets the assault on his lips with devastating desperation, giving himself up so eagerly that it strangles Bucky’s ribs. Both of Steve’s hands fly up to tangle in Bucky’s hair, pressing their faces together, their chins and their noses and their wet lips in between, curving his spine into Bucky’s body and Bucky’s touch, because Steve—the idiot— _wants_ this. Steve kisses like he wants to be swallowed alive. His prosthetic hand frees Steve’s jaw and comes down to hold Steve’s waist, gripping him, steadying him, but Bucky’s right hand stays put. It ravages Steve’s nipple as Bucky kisses the breath from his chest, fingertips harsh and hungry, still only a threat of the full-bodied devotion Bucky knows he’ll be pouring out soon.

The kiss soon overwhelms him and Bucky has to draw away, reveling in the whine of loss Steve lets go in the wake of their separation. Bucky is weak, though; he finds himself pressing wet, open-mouthed kisses along Steve’s cheek, his jaw, his chin, and all he wants is to keep his lips moving, but _fuck_ —he is insatiable. He rests his forehead against Steve’s shoulder with a shaky breath and tries to steady himself.

It doesn’t work. Bucky’s eyes are open, and now he sees his own hand, flesh fingers splayed, palm cupping Steve’s chest—holding one of Steve’s _tits_. It’s a sight he has only met in his dreams.

_“Oh, god...”_

Bucky isn’t sure which one of them says it and he’s not sure which one of them puts Steve onto his back, but that’s where Steve goes. He lays back all the way this time with his thick chest heaving, spread out beneath Bucky, spine flat against the sheets. His muscular thighs widen even more to let Bucky fall between them and Bucky intends to start with his hands—he really does—but he cannot keep from diving down to capture a nipple between his lips.

Pink tastes like skin and sweetness and Steve Rogers, just like Bucky knew it would. Steve cries out and arches his chest up into Bucky’s mouth, and Bucky’s ears are so filled with the mix of Steve’s baritone groans and tenor-high whimpers that he can’t hear the deep noises he’s making in his own throat, but he can feel them just the same. He does whatever he wants to Steve’s nipples; he licks them, he bites them, he sucks pretty little bruises into the muscles surrounding them, a frame of cool purple for all that warm peach. His tongue and teeth feel feral and unleashed, moving from one side to the other, using his hands to twist and play with whichever side he’s forced to leave to lave on the other. He rubs his own spit into each pebbled peak, admiring the way the cool air of the room makes them hard and stiff. Beautiful.

Steve’s responsiveness is a revelation. A symphony of noise streams freely from his lungs, and he is nothing less than desperate beneath Bucky, fingers tangling in Bucky’s hair, begging without words to keep his mouth on Steve’s chest. Steve hooks an ankle around Bucky’s calf, rolling his narrow hips up and rubbing their hardened groins together like he’s helpless to try and stop it. The fabrics of Steve’s sheet and Bucky’s precome-wet underwear create a friction that’s only half-pleasant, stinging Bucky’s self-abused dick, but it’s worth it. Anything is worth this.

Bucky knows that he is growling against Steve’s skin, and he knows that Steve can feel the vibrations. He uses both hands to squeeze Steve’s pecs together and buries his face in the middle furrow to rub the skin red with his beard. It—all of it—is a thousand times better than he could have imagined; Bucky could search every corner of his own rotten mind and not find a fantasy that holds a candle to this.

Bucky pinches something pretty and Steve arches with a breathy cry, and this time the bow of his back is so beautiful and so deep that it drags Bucky’s hands down to Steve’s stomach. The muscles he finds there are sensitive and hot to the touch, rippling pleasure beneath Bucky’s fingers. His hands stay there even when Steve’s back returns to the mattress. Bucky pulls his mouth away from the reddened little circles to look down, and he is appreciating how the olive tone of his own hand looks against Steve’s paler flesh when his eyes fall to the thin bedding spread over Steve’s cock. There is a pronounced wet spot.

“Go ‘head,” Steve whispers, breathing like he’s run a marathon. “Anything.”

Bucky’s eyes snap up to Steve’s face. His eyelids look heavy and his baby blues are dark, his mouth parted and wet. Bucky watches his throat bob with a dry-sounding swallow. Steve nods, once, his expression burning with permission and request.

He doesn’t waste time. Bucky pulls down the sheet.

Steve’s dick is full and flushed with a pretty smear of moisture just at the tip. It’s cut, smaller than Bucky had imagined it would be, and it’s nothing less than perfect with its handsome, purpled crown. Bucky wants to touch and lick and suck but he doesn’t—not yet. He sits back on his knees between Steve’s legs and lets his eyes wander lower, drinking down the way that Steve’s balls look soft and warm where they lie heavy against his perineum. They are smooth, Bucky notices, much like Steve’s chest.

“You have no hair.”

Steve pinks up in a splotchy burst of rose from his cheeks all the way down to his freshly abused tits.

“The uniform,” he mumbles. “It can rub and catch and I, um. I just like it like this.”

Bucky has to squeeze his eyes shut for a second to push away the image that creates—the picture of Steve shaving himself smooth to enjoy the softness under his own fingers, maybe looking in a mirror, maybe blushing at himself for touching so much. Bucky forces his lids open, drinking in more of the real Steve below him.

The shadows in the room prevent Bucky from being able to make out much else at the present angle, the rays of light from the night sky falling perpendicular to their bodies, but it is enough for Bucky to spot a thin sheen of something on the insides of Steve’s legs. He sees it up high on his thighs, shiny and clear, right in the soft place where his legs meet the curve of his ass, and it glistens. It is not sweat.

Steve takes notice of the shift in Bucky’s focus. The flush of exertion on his fair skin deepens with what might be shame, rose painted crimson. For a split second he looks like he wants to snap his legs shut, the muscles in his knees twitching. Steve leaves them open.

“I, um,” he starts, fumbling, soft. Steve’s voice quivers with fear or need or perhaps both. “Before bed, I was…”

Steve doesn’t finish his explanation. He shoots a furtive glance towards his nightstand, quick, self-conscious, and Bucky follows his eye line. Scattered across the surface he sees a few crumpled tissues, a tube of something, and a packet that appears to contain some sort of wipe. It takes Bucky a full five seconds of staring and then another glance between Steve’s open thighs before he finally understands.

“How,” Bucky says. He doesn’t mean for the question to sound like a command, but that’s exactly what it is.

Steve swallows again. Bucky is addicted to the way his throat undulates with the movement. He wants to bite it.

“Fingers,” Steve whispers. Humiliation colors his tone and oh, _god_ , is that gorgeous. “Just… just two.”

Bucky feels like he’s been punched in the chest.

He thinks of the dream, of himself, of James Buchanan Barnes with a young man’s sweet body draped across his lap. He thinks of vivid wet sounds and the way it felt to have two slick digits tucked inside all that delicate heat. Bucky had awoken and touched himself after. He’d let his hand fly over his cock to the memory of tightness gripping his fingers, and he’d wished so much that he could have seen it, that his own dreaming form could have laid eyes on the place where his flesh disappeared inside Steve’s, even a Steve that Bucky does not remember. He’d had to squeeze the base of his own dick—gluttonous and indulgent, wanting to draw it out—when his mind had supplied the image of Steve doing that to _himself_ , fingers inside his own body while Bucky watches and instructs, telling Steve what to do.

“Show me.”

This time, it is meant as a demand. He hears himself grind it out of his own throat and he watches Steve hear it, his eyes blowing wide just the way Bucky likes.

“What do you…”

Bucky sits back further and makes room. “Show me how you do it.”

(‘ _Fuck yourself_.’)

Steve’s response is a gorgeous, needy whine, and his leaking dick kicks up before falling back against his stomach with a faint but lewd smack. Bucky watches him squeeze his eyes shut for a moment and nod through a whispered, _“yeah, yes, anything,”_ before trailing a slow hand down his own body and adjusting his legs, bending his knees, widening them while pressing his feet flat against the bed. He opens his eyes and looks up at Bucky’s face. Steve’s hand stops briefly to give his own dick one slow, indulgent stroke, biting his wet bottom lip and letting his eyes fall shut against the sensation, but only for a moment; Steve doesn’t let himself linger. He continues down to below his balls, and the quiet sigh he lets out when his fingers brush at his own entrance is so juicy and saccharine that Bucky feels like he can taste it. The lighting is a little better than before in this position, with Steve’s leg up like that. It’s still not enough. Bucky needs to see him.

Bucky needs _more_.

His hands are on Steve’s hips before he even has a plan. He flips Steve over, inciting a stunned yelp when he starts dragging his strong body sideways, angling Steve with his ass towards the light source of the window. The weight of him is nothing to Bucky’s arm and Hydra’s shit serum, but it still seems to work Steve up. It occurs to Bucky that Steve has never been manhandled before. He wonders what else Steve has never done.

Steve looks dazed for a moment before he gathers his bearings. He gets himself up on all fours, giving Bucky an uncertain glance over his shoulder, but his cheeks fill up with the blush of a thrill.

“You still want…”

The new angle is sinful. There is more light this way, the shadows far diminished. Bucky can see the strong expanse of Steve’s back and the curvature of his ass just the same as he could that very first time a seizure lent him that image, the first time it flashed behind waking eyes. He still can’t see much of what lies between those shapely cheeks, not yet, because Steve’s ass is so plump and round and full that it obscures it and _Christ_ , Bucky wants to fill his hands up, wants to hold and grab and squeeze.

“Yes,” Bucky answers. “Like this. Show me.”

Steve lets out another quiet moan and hangs his head between his shoulders, breathing in deep like he’s trying to banish some sudden, overwhelming feeling. It’s as Steve is moving to spread his knees, sinking his chest into the mattress, arching his back in beautiful exhibition—face down, ass up—that it really, truly clicks with Bucky.

Steve wants to do this for Bucky. Steve wants to be _good_ for Bucky—and he wants that very, very badly.

With his knees low and wide in this new position, Bucky can see Steve’s cock and heavy balls dangling beneath his hips. They nearly touch the sheets. He is so busy staring at the sway of them and wondering how sensitive they would be if Bucky touched them that he doesn’t even think to look up to the newly exposed cleavage of Steve’s ass—not until he sees Steve reach one hand down behind his own back.

“Wait. Stop.”

Steve halts. His hand freezes where it is, hovering just over his lower back. He’s got his neck turned to press the side of his face into the mattress so he can see Bucky behind him, and his eyes go wide at the command.

“I want.” Bucky licks his lips. “Hold yourself open for me. I want to see.”

Something big and broken shakes its way out of Steve’s lungs. The noise sounds strangled, as though he’s trying to keep it in. Bucky watches Steve squeeze a desperate fist over his own balls, tugging on them like he just can’t help it. His hips jerk down to rut his dick into the mattress, chasing a desire for contact and friction that seems to overcome him at hearing Bucky’s order. Steve rubs his flame-red face into the sheets to quiet his crackling moans.

Then—obediently—Steve reaches both hands behind himself. He grabs the globes of his own ass and digs his fingers in deep. He spreads them.

Bucky forgets breathing altogether.

Steve is sweet and pink and smooth between his cheeks. The little ring of muscle is puckered but taut with the way it’s being held open, and if Steve really had his own fingers in himself earlier then Bucky could never have guessed it. The serum does well to keep that big body tight. Bucky wants to bury himself in it, ten different ways: his fingers, his cock, his tongue. He wants to worship Steve’s asshole, wants to tear it open, wants to wreck it until it’s red instead of pink and fuck it into shreds and then kiss it all better. Bucky wants to _own_ it.

Steve’s face peeks out from where it’s smashed against the bed to peer back at Bucky. He looks something between mortified and exhilarated by being so on display, but he also looks like he wants to know what Bucky is thinking—if Bucky likes what he sees.

Bucky does like what he sees. Bucky would _die_ for what he sees.

“Perfect,” Bucky murmurs, out of breath, unable to think of any more truthful way to describe what’s spread out before him. “Go ahead. Fingers.”

Bucky’s own dick is leaking and dripping in his underwear, but for once he ignores it and doesn’t try to stroke off. He moves forward and reaches out with shaky hands instead, rubbing the back of Steve’s thighs—hard and warm and thick—straining through a hole in his lust-choked mind to try and be a balm on Steve’s nerves when Steve is being so good.

Steve sighs at the skin-to-skin contact and nods weakly, overcome. He lets go of one cheek to probe at his own entrance with the tip of an index finger and _oh_ , Bucky can’t help but crawl forward and grab it again to keep that ass spread open. He can spot the shine of the leftover lubricant from Steve’s earlier work, and fuck if Bucky doesn’t want to trace his thumb over it.

Bucky wonders how often Steve plays with himself. Has he been fucking himself on his fingers every night, listening to Bucky slamming his fist over his own wet cock one room over? Does he bite his lip to keep quiet? And does he do it like this—with his ass in the air? Or does he lay on his back and look to the ceiling, imagining Bucky above him, thinking of his friend licking his chest and biting his neck and whispering filth into all his golden hair?

The tip of Steve’s finger pushes past his rim and Steve lets out a whiny little moan and fuck—fuck _fuck_ that tight, pink hole looks so damn hungry. It flutters and flexes around the finger like it’s trying to draw it in, and Bucky’s heart is pounding out of his ribcage, and his lungs are in his throat, and he wants to stick half of his own body inside of Steve’s and he would be content to sit here for the rest of the eternity and watch this ass swallow _anything_.

“More,” Bucky rasps.

Steve starts drawing the finger back out before he gets to the second knuckle. Bucky loves the way the pink skin drags with it.

“I—I need more, um.”

Steve’s head tilts in the direction of the nightstand, and Bucky picks up on what he’s trying to say. He gives Steve’s thighs a rough squeeze to say, _‘stay put,’_ and he knee-walks over to snatch up the tube of lubricant. Back in his spot, Bucky opens the cap and drizzles lube straight down between Steve’s cheeks without regard for volume control or how hard he’s squeezing it, his sole focus on getting Steve’s own fingers stuffed thick inside himself.

“That’s— _ah_!—that’s good, Buck,” Steve gasps, maybe chuckles. “That’s plenty.”

‘Plenty’ is an understatement; the crack of Steve’s ass is absolutely smothered in slick. Bucky snaps the tube closed and tosses it aside as Steve runs two fingers through the mess.

“Good.” Bucky pets the soft skin of Steve’s thigh and watches Steve sink a finger all the way down the last knuckle. He digs his own metal fingers deep into the flesh of the ass cheek he’s holding to keep Steve spread wide. “Keep going. More.”

Steve doesn’t protest the hungry pace of Bucky’s request. He slides another finger in alongside the first, quick and eager about it like he’s got a craving and _god_ —the way he listens to Bucky and does what he says is a thrill like Bucky has never known before. Steve works like he wants to be sweet to himself, pushing them in pulling them out, slow on the drag like he wants to really feel it.

Then Steve pauses his movements and pulls both fingers out, slow, stopping when only the very tips remain to stretch his gorgeous ring of pink. It’s like he’s showing off—like he’s letting Bucky see how long and wet his beautiful fingers are before sinking them back in down to the last knuckle, clenching as his body swallows them, singing out in quiet moans. He breathes, then does it all again. Soon he pulls free and rubs his fingertips in circles around the slick, pretty hole, and Bucky can see now how the muscle looks soft and loose without quite looking… open.

“You can take more than two,” Bucky finds his voice saying. It’s an observation and a question.

The words pull Steve out of a fog of self-pleasure. He makes a pitiful whining noise in response and nods his head up and down, gorgeous and desperate, pushing his ass back onto his own fingers like he wants to show Bucky how good he can be.

“Yeah I— Um. I’ve done four. Before.”

Four. Bucky wants nothing more than to say _fuck four_ and shove his own underwear off and fuck forward and down, to push open Steve’s insides on the end of his cock.

That would hurt Steve. Bucky must take this instead.

Steve’s eyes are shut against the sheets, so he doesn’t see it when Bucky’s hand moves. Bucky thinks that all of Steve’s senses must be blind to the world beyond the love of his own fingers, and it’s gorgeous, it’s breathtaking. It is nothing compared to the shock of a noise Steve lets loose when Bucky sinks one of his own in beside them.

“Oh _fuck!_ —yes, _yes_ Bucky yes touch me, stretch me out, oh my god, make me _feel_ it...”

Bucky doesn’t know what makes him dizzier: his name in Steve’s mouth or his flesh in Steve’s heat. Steve is vibrating now, the frantic energy coming off him in waves as he mewls and whines and pushes back onto Bucky’s finger and two of his own, shoving all three of them down until they’re good and buried and burning. Bucky can hear himself growling again.

“Do you like this?” he asks, mirroring the movements of Steve’s own fingers as he draws out slowly and shoves back in fast. “Does this hurt you?”

Bucky doesn’t understand why Steve looks embarrassed about the question, but he does. He flushes harder and rubs his face into the bed.

“Love it,” Steve breathes, barely audible. There’s a blissful expression mingling with the humiliation, an ear-to-ear smile half-hidden in the bedding. “So good, ‘s a good hurt, wanna be so full— _oh_!”

The words are barely out of Steve’s mouth before Bucky is pressing in a second finger of his own. That’s two of his own and that’s two of Steve’s. Four.

“Four,” Bucky declares, drowned out by Steve’s muffled crying.

It’s immediately clear that the stretch is too tight. Bucky can feel Steve’s slick heat strangling his fingers, threatening to cut off circulation. He can see every beautiful detail of Steve’s hole when he looks down, straining and shining around their four digits, the rim puffy already and wet with lube and Steve is _letting_ him do this, Steve wants him to do this. Steve asked him. Steve’s been plied open wide by too much, too soon, and he’s writhing, and he’s moaning, and his ass is pushing back like he’s never had anything better.

“Yes, _yes_.” Steve looks and sounds like he can barely control his own movements, his own _anything_ , desperate to move his fingers inside himself but overwhelmed with reality each time they rub up against Bucky’s. “Please, Buck— _fuck_ me with ‘em!”

Bucky is going to lose his soul inside of Steve. He is sure of it. He snarls, grabbing Steve’s narrow waist with his metal hand and pressing his own hips forward, forcibly tugging Steve’s ass over the intrusion of their bundled fingers. His hole swallows them all, entrance stretching even wider as it takes everything to the knuckle. It’s a fucking _gift_ of a sight. Bucky pulls his two all the way out and then slams them back in, again and again, picking up speed and racing towards gratification without caring if Steve’s own sloppy movements ever fall back into step.

Steve wants to scream; Bucky can see it on his face. His brow is pinched tight and he’s holding the sheets between his perfect teeth, biting down. His fingers have gone slack inside himself, a perfect pair of props to keep his tight ass open while Bucky reams it. Steve contains his sounds in his lungs until Bucky changes the direction of his pressure, fucking his fingers down and—and oh—

“ _Yes_ ,” Steve chokes, “yes, yes Bucky _right there_ yes ohmygod, _Buck_ —!”

Steve Rogers has a sweet spot.

His ass clenches so hard each time Bucky hits it that it feels like the force could break his fingers. A part of Bucky wants that to happen. He would thank Steve for it, kiss his ass wet—and then fuck him with his broken fist.

It’s sudden that Bucky remembers Steve’s cock. He reaches his metal hand beneath Steve, feeling the way his smooth balls are drawing up tight. Bucky squeezes them good and then wraps a hand around his dick, and they let out matching gasps when Bucky’s cool hand touches the warm silk of Steve’s shaft. It feels just like holding his own cock, but it stings less.

Steve hiccups through a cry and desperately ruts into Bucky’s hand, so pretty, so perfect, the jerky thrusts of his hips moving his ass over the lines of Bucky’s flesh fingers. Bucky can feel a string of watery liquid drooling from Steve’s pretty dick, and he rubs the slickness over Steve’s shaft and starts tugging, just experimenting.

It takes all of three pulls before Steve is spilling with a suffocated shout of Bucky’s name.

Steve is incendiary when he comes. The arch of his back deepens and his insides clamp down in a threat to crush bone and melt flesh. The sensors of Bucky’s hand report back with _warm_ and _wet_ as Steve’s dick pulses into his vibranium palm. Bucky doesn’t let up; his fingers keep fucking Steve through tremors and spasms that feel like they go on forever—but it’s the sounds that Steve makes that arrest Bucky’s being. Steve moans and pleads, praying to some god or to Bucky about this ambush of sensation. Steve tries hard to smother the noise against the mattress, but it’s useless. His deep voice sings and sings, for Bucky and for lifetimes, until finally his pleasure rests.

The scent of lube and cock hovers fragrant in the air of the bedroom. Steve pants, pulling his fingers out and wiping them against the sheets shakily, but otherwise doesn’t move from his position: chest on the bed, ass in the air, wet mouth breathing into the mattress.

All of Bucky’s hands and fingers stay right where they are. He is nothing short of a man obsessed. He touches and touches, lightly, basking in Steve’s sensitivity as Bucky’s fingers inside him circle that precious spot without ever quite pressing down. He soaks in the feeling of Steve’s body as it whimpers and squirms, trying to tether itself to the bed instead of floating away.

Steve’s cock is still hard in Bucky’s hand when the last tremor leaves him. Perhaps the serum has given Steve’s arousal the same resilience that Bucky is cursed with. He gives Steve’s dick a squeeze, and there’s a wet squelching noise as Steve’s spend is pressed into the spaces between Bucky’s fingers. Steve moans at the lewd sound.

_“Bucky…”_

And there it is—his name, on Steve’s lips again. Bucky wants to chase it. Bucky wants to eat it off his goddamn tongue. Gently, he starts to apply pressure to Steve’s prostate again, greedy for high _‘nngh’_ sounds Steve gives him for it. Bucky recalls the angel that once rested in his arms with an impotent dick, remembering how James Buchanan Barnes had crooked his fingers just right to make his boy fall apart.

“Can you still come like that?” Bucky husks, tapping out a broken rhythm where Steve needs it most—and where he’s far too sensitive to take it. “From just inside?”

Steve shivers and huffs out a disbelieving moan, nodding weakly. “Yes. Yes.”

“Okay. Good.” Bucky can hear the grinding of rocks in his own voice. “You’re going to show me that.”

Then Bucky is moving and rearranging Steve, putting his body exactly how Bucky decides he wants him, pulling his fingers out and smearing lube over Steve’s hips in the process. His own used, tired cock is a throbbing pain where it’s trapped in his underwear. Bucky continues to ignore it.

 _“On your stomach,”_ he orders gruffly, even as he’s putting Steve there himself.

Steve makes a confused half-sound but does not resist in the slightest when Bucky yanks his legs out straight from under him, thighs spread open with Bucky kneeling between. As he moves, Bucky uses the grip he still has with his metal hand on Steve’s wet dick to pull it down, to pull it back and underneath Steve, tucking the shaft and balls so that they are exposed with their undersides facing up while Steve’s belly rests against the sheets.

“Oh my god, this is— _Bucky_ , I—oh my god…”

It’s a vision: Steve Rogers spread open beneath him, flat on his stomach, head resting on his forearms, and _god_ , those thick, strong thighs spread with a hard dick trapped between them so that only Bucky can touch it. He has no intention of doing so.

There’s never been a sight more lovely or more vulnerable than Steve Rogers is beneath him. The skin of his back feels perfect and blazing against Bucky’s chest when he leans over it, covering Steve’s body with his own, but it’s nothing like the pressure of Steve’s fleshy ass cheeks when Bucky presses his covered cock against one side. Bucky gets nice and close and caresses Steve’s ear with his lips.

“That’s right,” Bucky soothes with someone else’s voice. He slips his hand between their bodies to work three fingers back inside Steve—left hand, this time. “Just take it, sweetheart.”

For the flash of one second, Bucky’s own words blindside him. They seem to come from nowhere. He’s forced to snap out of it when Steve makes a shocked, scandalized sound, and at first Bucky thinks it’s in reaction to the new feeling inside him—metal wet with lube and Steve’s own come—but then Bucky sees Steve nodding into the bedding again, and he’s mewling, and he’s gasping, and he’s—like he wants—

Oh, Jesus. Fuck yes.

“Yeah, baby?” Bucky rumbles, heaving another endearment from the depths of some dream, or perhaps a memory. “You like to be called sweet things?”

The sheets have got to be rubbing Steve’s cheek raw by now with how much he’s been nodding and smashing his face into the bed, whining out beautiful _‘yeah’_ noises through his wet, open mouth and giving Bucky everything he could ever want. Bucky arrests the movement with a hand on Steve’s jaw, flesh and blood, gripping it firmly and holding it still. Steve tenses, then melts into the mattress.

Bucky can feel something in his spine dropping low, dropping down. He is falling at a pace like molasses, spinning into something that feels new and old at the exact same time, slotting into the cast of a mind that belongs to the man he is now or maybe a man he has already been. It’s a man that knows how to please Steve.

It feels natural; it feels right. The monster in Bucky decides he’s going to let it.

“That’s good, sweetheart.” His hand slides down to cup the front of Steve’s throat, heavy and present but not squeezing. “That’s real good.”

Steve’s sigh breathes out all that is left of his weight. Bucky grins to himself, wolfish and triumphant. He rolls his hips forward into the meat of Steve’s ass at the same time that he pushes his fingers deeper, and Steve’s noises are muffled but profound, vibrating through his body and up into Bucky’s chest and shaking the marrow of his bones. He pulls back, letting his fingertips stroke over that sweet, special spot and drinking in the surprised little chirping it gets him.

Bucky savors it, Bucky milks it. He glides his hand and hips forward again, then back again, and he builds himself a pace. His bruised dick protests each time he pushes it against Steve through the friction of his underwear, but it’s so fucking worth it and Bucky will gladly take the hurt; he’ll beg for it. Bucky would take another seventy years of torture if that’s what it took to get Steve beneath him like this, writhing and crying and begging for more.

His tongue and his teeth want to move and run wild. For a moment Bucky wishes he had two mouths, one to bite down on the back of Steve’s neck until he screams while the other whispers atrocities into his ear. He’ll take one of them now. The other, he’ll have to have later.

“I want you,” he breathes against the shell of Steve’s ear. His tongue darts to lick it, then nips. “I want you more than I want to breathe.”

Steve’s moan is so thick that Bucky has to sink his canines into it. He turns Steve’s jaw in his hand and takes his mouth in a brutal kiss, more spit and teeth than tongue and lips. The angle is odd and difficult, and it’s perfect, and Bucky presses his thumb deep into the strained muscle he finds on Steve’s neck before letting go of his head, pushing his own face into Steve’s hair and gritting his teeth.

“I have thought of your body for every moment that I’ve been alive for weeks.” Bucky inhales the sweet taste of Steve’s sweat. He shoves his thumb in Steve’s mouth, pressing down on his tongue while his metal fingers make war on Steve’s prostate. “ _Months_ , Stevie. Did you know? Did you know it was always you?”

Steve whimpers and groans and slurps on the thumb like Bucky’s given him a gift, and his head moves as much as it can, confined, but Bucky doesn’t know if it’s a nod or a shake, only that it’s desperate.

“Every time you sat there and watched my dick get hard, did you know it was because I wanted you like this?” He yanks his thumb free to press it hard against the corner of Steve’s red, swollen mouth, pushing it back into his cheek. “When you bit your lip, did you know that I’d see and think about fucking your face?”

Steve’s whine sounds like it comes from a wild animal. Bucky can feel him trying to rut his hips into the bed, trying fruitlessly to get friction on his helpless, trapped dick. Now that his mouth isn’t full, Steve is quick to run it.

“I—I _wanted_ you to, always, want that—”

Bucky makes a feral noise and his hand leaves Steve’s jaw, shoving under Steve’s chest, groping and squeezing at every piece of flesh his fingers touch. He finds a nipple and pinches it, meanly, going until Steve shouts.

“When you wore those tight fuckin’ shirts that show off your tits, did you know I’d want to slide my dick between them?”

“ _Please_ , Bucky, want it, need it so much…”

“I’ll bet you think you do, bet you think you’d want my cock.” Steve keens high at that, his body jerking beneath Bucky. “You’d beg for it. You’d choke on it, if I let you.”

“Yes, _yes_ , anything, need you _._ ”

Bucky rolls his hips forward into the wet slip of Steve’s ass and growls viscerally into his ear.

“Bet you think you wanna get fucked—”

“— _yes_ oh my god yes, I want it, _please_!”

“Yeah? Think you want me to get my fat cock out so I can slip up inside you?”

“ _Please_ , Bucky! Yes, I want it—everything you want to give, _I want it_ —”

Steve makes a sharp bark of a sound when Bucky jerks away suddenly and flips Steve’s body over on the bed. He wastes no time spreading Steve’s thighs, shoving into the space between them until his covered dick is pressed up against Steve’s slick asshole, pressing in like he’s going to fuck him straight through the fabric.

“You don’t,” he grinds out. The teasing is gone from his voice. “You _can’t_ want this.”

Bucky stares down, breathing heavy and charged with static, before exhaling and collapsing all of his weight onto Steve. He squeezes his eyes shut, a last ditch attempt to get his voracious body and mind under control. Tears of frustration strain against his eyelids.

Bucky is weak; he cannot do this. He also can’t stop the bulge of his cock from rutting itself between Steve’s cheeks.

Steve breathes and shakes for a moment, stunned, disoriented by the sudden turn in mood, but then his arms come up to surround Bucky. In spite of everything, Steve holds him—an impossible and undeserved comfort—while he stuffs his face in the crook of Steve’s neck and tries his best to inhale him. He waits for Bucky to speak first.

“Some of the things I’ve thought of doing…” His voice rings so low and so deadly in his own ears that even the Soldier would not recognize it. “I’d kill another man if he did those things to you.”

The words are an awful, violent promise, and they’re meant to be a cold bucket of water over Steve. They set him on fire instead. Something about the thought—about Steve being big and strong and more than able to defend himself but Bucky fighting for him anyways—turns Steve into a frantic mess of hands and lips. It is the absolute worst thing that could happen. Bucky hates that this turns Steve on but he fucking _loves_ that it does—loves that Steve wants Bucky’s body and muscle and bone to be his and surround him and keep him and make him _his._ It’s a sick positive feedback loop of the wrong kind of energy, and it makes Bucky growl and suck possessive bruises onto Steve’s throat like he’s trying to cradle the pulse between his teeth.

“I would,” Bucky snarls with a nip to Steve’s jaw. “I’d do it. I’d rip his fuckin’ _throat_ out, sweetheart.”

The sound Steve makes is nearly a sob as his hands burst into action, pawing at the line of Bucky’s cock through his boxer briefs like he just can’t wait a second longer. Bucky bites his own lip against the all-too-familiar mix of pain and pleasure bursting from the nerves on his overworked dick and _fuck_ —he wants to get it inside Steve.

He tears his mouth from Steve’s spit-slick neck and kneels up between his legs, fighting the urge to stop and stare at the sinful sight of Steve spread wide below him. Steve follows the urgency and sits up straight. He uses shaky hands to peel down Bucky’s underwear, pushing the elastic below his cock and his balls—and then Steve halts, sucking in a loud breath.

“Oh, Buck… are you…”

It takes a moment of studying himself for Bucky to realize why Steve looks so wracked, because it’s a pitiful sight, but it’s all Bucky knows anymore. Now that he has a side-by-side view with Steve’s gorgeous, perfect cock, Bucky sees exactly how much his own looks angry and chafed. The skin isn’t broken thanks to the serum, the healing factor keeping up with how much Bucky needs to pull off, but there are still places on the shaft that vibranium has clearly rubbed halfway to raw. His dick’s bigger and thicker than Steve’s, and there’s an attractive bead of pre-come drooling from the tip—and all of that matters for shit when the rest of his cock looks only like pain and compulsion.

Bucky is about to pull away and tug his boxers up, to flip Steve over and eat out his ass until they both forget, but then he looks closer at Steve’s face. He isn’t cringing in disgust. He isn’t drawing away in horror. He isn’t wincing and covering his own dick in sympathy. Steve is all wide, glassy eyes and slack jaw, reaching out to curl a hand over Bucky’s hip while the other rises up to touch him.

“Is it—can I?”

Dumbfounded, Bucky nods. Steve gives him an oddly grateful look, and then he curls a hand around the shaft so sweetly and so gingerly that when Bucky hisses at the contact it’s borne of nothing but pleasure. Steve pauses, unsure, waiting for direction.

“Go ahead, doll,” Bucky says, the corner of his mouth ticking up. “Not gonna hurt me.”

Steve’s skin flushes at the name, and it spreads down his neck and chest in splotches as a beautiful, bright burst of pinks. He starts moving his hand slowly, so gently that he’s petting the skin of Bucky’s cock more than he’s jerking him off. The touch is so sweet and so loving, so good. Bucky could pass out.

“How sore is it?”

Bucky’s threads his flesh fingers through Steve’s hair while his left hand cups the side of Steve’s neck, holding and protecting the vulnerable heat of Steve’s jugular in an unrestrained assertion of ownership. He brushes the metal thumb along Steve’s sculpted jawline and lets him see the heat in his eyes.

“Not enough to keep my hand off it. Not with you in my head.”

Steve’s eyes go wide with a sharp but quiet gasp before they flutter shut. He turns his face into Bucky’s hand, pressing a kiss to the metal palm and his face flares up in color and oh, dear—Steve likes that thought. Steve _likes_ that Bucky wants him so much that he can’t keep his hand off himself, he _likes_ that Bucky needs Steve so bad that his dick could bleed to think of him.

“That’s right, sweetheart,” Bucky croons, stroking Steve’s stubbled cheek. “This is what you do to me.”

Bucky watches Steve breathe, in and out, smiling into the safety of Bucky’s fond hand like he’s trying his best to hide it. He opens his eyes and looks up through his lashes. There’s a glimmer in his gaze.

“Can I kiss it better?”

It’s the masculine richness beneath the infantile tone that fucks Bucky up the most. His hand tightens in Steve’s hair of its own accord, and then he’s guiding Steve’s mouth towards his hot, aching cock. Steve’s breath hitches in excitement at the permission before taking what Bucky’s allowed him.

With blue eyes wide, Steve kisses it. He tilts Bucky’s dick up and presses his lips right against the underside of the tender flesh, two velvety sweet cushions to caress the sting away. Steve moans like the contact does just as much for him as it does for Bucky, and then his eyes slide closed as he does it again, sinking into his own private world. His devotions turn wet when Steve’s cheeks color, and his tongue slips out for a taste.

Steve is so very gentle with Bucky’s cock. He holds it and loves it like he’s trying to… like he’s trying to tell it that he’s sorry, contrite and apologetic, like he wants to repent for making it hurt but also—but also like he’s thanking it for hurting for him. Every part of that thought sounds wrong in Bucky’s head and tastes like sugar on his tongue. Steve’s spit is a salve to his poor, tender flesh. The heat of his lips is a balm. Steve is Bucky’s refuge from pain, and _fuck_ … the man is a goddamned picture.

Steve's confidence starts to grow, or perhaps that’s just hunger. The hand he’s got on Bucky’s hip allows itself to wander, exploring Bucky’s waist and legs and abs before dropping low to knead his ass. When Steve’s wet lips finally close on the tip, the moan he lets out echoes through Bucky in long waves of vibration and it’s here, this is it—this is Bucky’s fracturing point.

Bucky is dizzy; Bucky is gone. He isn’t gentle when he hauls Steve off by the nape of his neck and tugs down, angling his face up for Bucky’s starving eyes. Steve mewls at the loss but goes right along, pliant and inviting, showing off the moonlit expanse of his throat. There is a string of saliva connecting Steve’s bottom lip to the head of Bucky’s cock, and his mouth is more red than any cherry Bucky’s kissed. It splits his fucking ribs apart.

The orgasm whips around the edge of Steve’s breath without warning and aims itself straight for Bucky’s core. He wraps his hand over Steve’s to stroke off the shaft with their pressure joined together, and Steve moans like he’s the one being touched. His mouth looks like candy, and his eyes look like rain. Bucky grabs onto both as a dam inside breaks and the foam-blue of the deluge paints his mind blank.

Another century might expire before his eyesight returns. Steve is there, the flush on his face and chest streaked in white. He’s looking up at Bucky with a half-lidded gaze and moaning so, so quietly, nearly under his breath. When Bucky looks further and sees Steve’s wrist moving between his own legs. He’s not jerking himself off. He’s holding himself open.

He releases Steve’s hair to run his fingers through the mess, using his thumb to push lewd globs of white from Steve’s cheeks to the corner of Steve’s mouth. Steve’s sigh is pretty when his tongue darts out to lick each and every pass clean. Bucky’s voice sounds foreign when he hears himself speak.

“Did I ever fuck you?”

Steve’s lashes are heavy, clumped together with come, when he looks up and through them and shakes his head ‘no’. Bucky nearly asks more— _'has_ anyone _fucked you’_ —but he doesn’t; he bites his own murderous tongue.

Bucky doesn’t need to know. Bucky needs to take.

His bones feel crazed when he pushes Steve back with strong grips on his shoulders and waist. Bucky’s own cock hasn’t wilted an ounce, and it doesn’t matter that he’s sensitive from Steve and bruised from himself. He’s gone and found something to have as his own because James Buchanan Barnes, a right-minded man, was far too afraid to ruin it.

Bucky is skilled at ruin.

Everything is desperation and touch-hungry hands, but then once Bucky gets Steve beneath him, slots himself between Steve’s legs… the whole of his world slows down. He doesn’t know why. Steve’s eyes are still wide and his breathing is still hard, the thoughts behind his eyes speeding by. He remains in that frenzy, shoving Bucky’s underwear off and away, wrapping his legs around Bucky’s waist in a frantic plea for _faster_ and _more_ but for just a moment, the need doesn’t matter. Bucky is treading on solid ground.

“When I saw you on that bridge, I knew you.”

Steve’s raging breaths turn quiet. His thighs relax and fall to Bucky’s hips, and his blue eyes strip themselves naked. Bucky runs a hand down the side of Steve’s face like he’s trying to memorize every line and pore and shadow.

“Sweet boy,” he breathes, brushing Steve’s mouth in the barest whisper of a kiss. “Sweet boy… I knew you.”

Steve exhales with a crackling noise that breaks its way out of his throat. His hands tighten on the back of Bucky’s shoulders, gripping the edges of this body’s marred skin. He looks up at Bucky like he’s looking at a mirage and deciding to believe that it’s real. Bucky can sense the beginnings of need crawling its way out of his own skin again, but for just a moment he finds a way to temper it.

“They tried to drown you out of my head,” he rasps, mouthing over Steve’s chin and wet face as he fills in the flesh of a memory, reaching across a distance between them that’s both scant and wide as a chasm. “They broke my goddamn dick to try and keep you out. But I wanted you.”

Steve gasps out his name like a fractured hymn. Bucky swallows it down with his tongue. He is Bucky and he is the Soldier, searching for purpose in silver-blue light and waiting for seventy years to find it.

“I wanted you before I knew how to want you.” He takes Steve’s mouth in a raw fit of new hunger and ruts his dick forward against his wet hole. He presses on both like a promise. “But, _now_ …”

The last syllables push their way out of him in a growl, hardly intelligible, as Bucky pulls up and sits back on his knees. Steve lets out a sound that’s a whine and a moan when Bucky shows his purpose, pressing the tip of his dick to where Steve’s soft and slick.

“Now,” he repeats, bruising Steve’s thigh. “Now I know every way.”

Steve’s expression is beatific when Bucky pushes himself inside, red mouth hanging open in a silent song. It is a miracle that Bucky manages to see his face at all when he’s being devoured alive by the rest of the sight between them. His dreams never did get this part right.

Steve’s hole is hot and willing and far, far too tight to be real as Bucky’s cockhead slides its way through, slow as his hunger can stand. Steve’s wide eyes squeeze shut and his brow knits together, flushed face alight with what would be pain if weren’t absolute rapture instead. Bucky hitches in another inch, swearing aloud. Steve raises a hand to his mouth and starts biting down on his own knuckles so hard that it looks like it could break skin, and Bucky realizes that Steve is doing it to block the sounds he wants to make, to smother the sugary keening and groaning that Bucky needs to hear more than his lungs need to breathe. Bucky abandons the sight of his cock disappearing to lay himself down on Steve’s body.

“No,” Bucky growls, monster uncaged, grabbing Steve’s hand roughly and yanking his fist from his mouth with more force than he means to before pinning it next to Steve’s head. His dick sinks further into the heat between the shifting of weight and the instinctive forward motion that comes with biting on his own words. “You _make_ the noises I fuck out of you.”

Steve does.

Steve screams high into heaven when his walls clench down to crush Bucky’s steel-hard cock. He’s barely halfway buried, but their stomachs are wet, and Steve is shouting and shaking on the end of his dick. Bucky groans in disbelief and pulls up to get eyes down between them.

Jesus fucking _Christ_.

Steve’s cock is still spitting white when Bucky pulls out and shoves home in one hard thrust, abandoning any last dregs of the illusion of self-control; discipline is done for. The impact earns him shocked cry—of course it does—but that makes him chase after another.

Bucky knows he should stop. Steve’s dick is still hard, but he should pull out. He has jerked himself off into oversensitivity enough for ten lifetimes, and he knows that it does not feel pleasant. Steve deserves tender and Steve deserves slow—but Bucky’s blood burns to _break_. He’s been swallowed by something more than an urge: to not stop, to keep going, to keep packing Steve full of cock. Bucky needs to know what it’s like to pound Steve’s tight heat and make Steve’s pink dick wet again and fuck him and fuck him until Steve is begging Bucky for softness.

“I’m not going to stop,” is what Bucky says, and would kill another man for saying the same.

The up-and-down jerking of Steve’s neck is furious when he nods his agreement, scrambling to bring Bucky closer. He whines at first when Bucky doesn’t go, kneeling his weight back instead—but then Steve’s eyes go big and gorgeous with fear when Bucky slings his knees over Bucky’s shoulders and takes his waist between two hands, leaning forward and bending Steve’s big, muscular body in half.

Steve takes Bucky’s cock like that’s his only design. His body yields freely before Bucky’s resolve to carve out a space for himself, and he gasps with gratitude when Bucky gives him pleasure despite the lacing of discomfort and pain. He tightens his ass each time Bucky pulls out, dragging his heat along Bucky’s dick and squeezing like he’s begging him to stay. He doesn’t squirm away when Bucky purposefully nails his tenderized, over-sensitive sweet spot, no—he grabs at Bucky by the back of his neck and whimpers and pulls him in tight.

He’s absolution, and he’s Steve, and right now he is _Bucky’s_. Steve makes gorgeous sounds that come out as panting and saccharine, half-swallowed whines, but the harder Bucky fucks him, the more Steve gets overwhelmed and tries to bite his own mouth shut.

“Noises,” Bucky warns, voice low and gruff. He screws in and fucks a pretty hiccup from Steve’s chest, leaning down to growl into his ear. “Let them _out_.”

He’s learned that Steve likes it when Bucky does that. It makes him moan and clench down, the vise of his ass filling Bucky’s vision with white spots again.

“B’cky, if… people will _hear—_ ”

“I don’t fucking care. You ashamed of how good you take my dick?” He pulls out all the way and slams back in, awash with pride at the long, clear shout he finally rips from Steve, letting the pitch of fire sear the walls inside his veins. “You think they’ll hear and they’ll _know_ how you come from just cock?”

“ _Your_ cock!” Steve sobs and oh, he is crying real tears now. “Come from _your_ cock, Bucky!”

Bucky throws his head back with a roar of approval. Steve sounds so fucking good when his lungs get loud and his cheeks get wet. Lava boils in his gut and he’s gotta—he’s gotta watch. He slows his hips and pulls up, grunting, tugging Steve’s arms until he’s holding his own thighs back and spreading himself open for Bucky.

 _“Fuck…”_ Bucky groans, looking nowhere but down. Steve’s face is red-hot and his eyes are shut against shame while he finally lets noises spill free—but it’s the sight of Bucky’s cock pulling out and sinking in that sends him halfway to his grave. Bucky alternates pace, fast and then slow, watching Steve’s ass grip and grab and open and open and grab and grip and get itself _fucked_ , good and hard, over and over again like this is what Steve’s for.

He fucks Steve like that until Steve’s arms are too weak with pleasure to hold his own legs any longer, and then Bucky needs to drink his name off of Steve’s lips again. He lays himself low and wraps Steve’s thighs around his hips, taking him slower, but taking him deep.

“Tell me you’ve never had another man but me,” he commands, barely recognizing the register of his own voice. He finds that he doesn’t even care if Steve answers truthfully so long as he says the words, so long as he says that his body is Bucky’s. He slams his cock in harder to drive the order home.

“Oh, _god_!”

The inside of Steve turns Bucky into a man possessed. Overcome with a sudden impulse, he reaches a hand down to touch around the joining of their flesh. His fingertips press against the steel of himself through the strained skin of Steve’s hole, and he’s still mesmerized by the way all that wet, clenching muscle gets tugged back and forth—in, out, in, dragging and pulling with the friction of Bucky’s thrusts. Without thinking, Bucky twists the index finger in, bullying through the resistance until his second, metallic knuckle is sliding in alongside his own cock.

Steve screams at the sudden added intrusion. The sound makes Bucky’s hips stutter, a shockingly human panic, worried that Steve’s cry was all in pain before he looks at his face and finds only stunned bliss.

There’s nothing for it. Bucky growls and slams his cock back in, pushing in the finger the rest of the way.

“Tell me,” he repeats. He pulls the finger out to hook it just inside of the pliant rim, tugging, the stretch of it rending another euphoric cry out of Steve. “ _Say it._ Say this hole has always been mine.”

“Always, Buck,” Steve sobs, nodding hysterically. “Just yours.”

Steve is scorching. A bleeding ulcer in Bucky’s brain wonders if he could pound Steve so hard that he fucks straight through reality—that he _knocks Steve up_. It’s a terrible thought, too dazzling and abrupt, and it wrenches something wounded out of Bucky’s throat. There’s a sick sense of something perfect in it: Steve rounded, Steve owned. It makes Bucky awful. It makes his cock jerk. He is throbbing in Steve, left with no choice but to chase his own pulse, so he pulls his finger out to clear the way and thrusts after it, fucking his hips forward until he's buried as deep as he’ll get at this angle—and then he keeps going, going, pushing Steve's knee back, taking him deeper than fantasy can reach. 

If he can’t own Steve with seed, Bucky will have to find a different way. He leans over and bites into Steve’s flesh, eating the muscled curve of Steve’s shoulder, sinking his teeth in so far that they knock at blood’s door. Steve howls his way through it, perfect and loud, one hand grasping at Bucky’s sweaty hair. Bucky releases and licks—laving, tasting—his tongue rolling and tracing the brilliant burst of new color that attests this man is his.

 _“Mine,”_ Bucky snarls, proof.

Steve’s affirming nods are spasmodic, desperate. Wild. His crying becomes just as erratic, and it’s a glorious, wet sound, catching in Steve’s throat until Bucky frees it with a kiss and swallows it down. They’re both close now, Bucky knows, but their eyes stay open on each other’s even when Steve’s body starts to tighten and shake.

“Y— _yours_ ,” Steve repeats, a broken and croaking sob of a promise. “Swear it, Buck. Been yours.”

Steve uses his full strength to hold Bucky close, refusing to let him pull back and stare. Bucky doesn’t fight it. He is Steve’s, now, even more than Steve is his, but Bucky doesn’t need a mark on his skin or words in his ears to know how much that is true. Steve holds him, and Steve kisses him soft, whispering Bucky’s own name against his trembling lips.

Something impossible happens.

A caustic fog lifts, and everything slows. Bucky’s skull breathes. He can hear his own thoughts and they are—they are _Bucky’s_ thoughts. His own. They are loud and clear and belong only to him: the man inside Steve, the man inside himself. These thoughts, finally, do not own Bucky. _Steve_ owns Bucky, and Steve gives this to him.

What his thoughts say are this:

The sky outside has gotten brighter. The glow streaming through windows to bounce off of sheets is a vivid reminder that starlight can burn, can singe, just the same as flame. James Buchanan Barnes knew that from the time he was six years old. The Soldier knew it, too, had learned it in the night, in darkness and in solitude. Bucky knows it now because Bucky’s been singed. Body, heart. Soul.

Starlight exists to light Steve’s face. It’s the color of the flush shining on his cheeks that opens Bucky up and wipes Bucky clean. This, he remembers. This is not a fantasy, and this is not a dream.

His angel returns, back now with a face. Steve’s face. Bucky can see it on him now: that radiant, rose glow. It’s the shade that kissed the skin of Bucky’s thin, naked angel just the same as it kisses Steve now. That hue, that amaranth—it is a siren’s call. It's a lighthouse, bright, shining at the edge of a storm.

That’s what Steve has always been.

Steve comes, and Bucky breaks. It is more than just Bucky; it is history igniting. It’s the man he is now and every man that he’s been, all of them breaking in tandem. It’s atoms of the Soldier and of Bucky and of James Buchanan Barnes, shattering apart and then falling together, fusing. All of it for this, all of it for Steve.

All of it—at once—in one blinding flash of pink.

“I loved you, too,” Bucky rasps, forehead pressed into Steve’s with their sweat and breath mixing. “I loved you then, when we were small. When we were young.”

Steve’s next sob comes in pieces. Bucky’s hips still pound into that quaking heat, barreling through the last pulses of Steve’s pleasure. Both of Steve’s hands are buried in Bucky’s hair, desperately clutching, holding their faces as close as they can get to share spit and touch and memory and to never, ever let go.

“I loved you when I was in the dark,” Bucky breathes—all of him breathes—pitch falling in a threat to fall away. “I love you now. I love you here.”

Not an inch is spared between their skin for atmosphere to filter in. Bucky pumps himself deep, and he brings himself close, held tight in Steve’s arms while Steve breaks Bucky down and quietly loves Bucky back.

“ _Please_ ,” Steve weeps, ethereal and glowing under Bucky’s moving body. “Please, Buck—inside me. Be the only one.”

Bucky is.

Steve beams and cries out when Bucky spills in him, a big body to contain an even bigger love. He collapses on him afterward, pulsing cock still inside. Steve’s hands stroke through their combined sweat as it cools. He presses his lips to Bucky’s temple.

He’ll need more tonight, later. Steve might—but Bucky certainly will. He’ll soften halfway and hold Steve while he sleeps, and in the morning he’ll wake him with his mouth and his tongue. He’ll take Steve slow, next time; he’ll be what Steve deserves. For now, he’ll stay here. He’ll kiss Steve and be heavy on Steve and he’ll breathe Steve into his lungs.

This is how Bucky Barnes will live his life, now and after. Violence will die. Pain will dissolve into something that can be used to love Steve, instead of hurting. Desire will exist to be sated. He will be one man. He will make a vessel of himself for Steve to fill full, and the weight of it will be the only anchor Bucky needs. But for now—just for now—Bucky holds Steve, and he sleeps.

Bucky doesn’t dream.

Bucky doesn’t need to.

* * * * * * *

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> One million ‘thank you’s to every single person who read and supported this story. It’s my proudest writing moment to-date and I’m so, so happy that it was received with emotion. 
> 
> If you could, please take a moment to click over to the [Ao3 art page](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26756380/chapters/65273653) for this story and drop and kudo and/or comment to support the incredible work of [hundredthousands](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hundredthousands/pseuds/hundredthousands), who perfectly illustrated the visions born in my brain.

**Author's Note:**

> On tumblr: [@the1918](https://the1918.tumblr.com/), [@hundredthousands-art](https://hundredthousands-art.tumblr.com/)


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